Internet Marketing Advantage Blog

Creativity.

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesnít matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people donít know that you exist, it doesnít matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of oneís product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they wonít block it and open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moirÈ popular. Remember the movie ìThe Blair Witch Projectî?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoftís Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Now itís your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.

Getting your site an optimum listing in Yahoo! is perhaps the most important step in effective web site promotion. An optimum listing in Yahoo! can bring in more traffic to your site than all the search engines combined. In addition to this, getting listed in Yahoo! will also help you improve the link popularity of your site which helps in improving the ranking of your site in the search engines. In this article, we focus on how you can get your site an optimum listing in Yahoo!.

First, you should note that Yahoo! is not a search engine – it is a directory. Unlike the search engines, an actual human editor evaluates your site.

Before starting, read Yahoo!’s instructions thoroughly. Read their Help Index and their How To page. Familiarize yourself with these instructions because they mean every word of what they say.

Before you submit your site, go through your entire site and ensure that there are no missing graphics, no links leading to empty or non-existent pages, no “Under construction” symbols and no typos or grammatical errors. Your site should be easy to navigate, should load quickly and should look professional. Furthermore, your site must provide unique content. Yahoo!’s definition of unique content is very strict – if your site simply consists of a one page sales letter, or, if it only contains links to various affiliate programs, you will find it impossible to get listed. For getting listed in Yahoo!, your site needs to have at least a few pages of good content in it.

Also, your site needs to be in its own domain, especially if it is of a commercial nature. Having your own domain adds more credibility to your site and tells Yahoo! that yours is a serious site which won’t be taken down very soon. Getting into Yahoo! is hard enough – not having your own domain will make it that much harder.

Furthermore, if your site is of a commercial nature (i.e. it is selling something), you need to mention the physical address of your business either in the home page of your site or in a separate Contact Us page which is linked prominently from the home page. This should be the actual physical address of your business – not a Post Office Box address. Of course, mentioning the physical address of your business is something you should be doing anyway – it boosts the credibility of your business which improves sales. Along with the physical address, you should also mention a phone number and a fax number (if you have one). Of course, you should always mention an email address.

Also, before submitting, select the two most important keywords for your site based on their popularity. If you don’t know how to choose the keywords which are applicable for your site, have a look at my article on Choosing the correct keywords for your site. In this article, I have mentioned that while selecting the keywords for your site, you should look at both the popularity of the keyword as well as its competitiveness. However, for the purpose of this article, don’t worry about the competitiveness – select keywords only on the basis of popularity.

Now, let’s analyze how Yahoo! displays its search results. There are 4 sections in the Yahoo! search results – Categories, Web Sites, Web Pages, and News. For the purpose of this article, we can ignore the News section and concentrate on the Categories, Web Sites and Web Pages sections. When someone searches for a keyword in Yahoo!, it first checks to see whether there are any categories which contain all the individual words of the keyword. If so, it first displays the names of those categories. It then displays the web sites in the Yahoo! index which match the keyword. Finally, in the Web Pages section, it displays sites from Google.

Your first task is to find out whether your site is already listed in Yahoo!. Type in the domain name of your site in Yahoo!’s search box, and see whether your site comes up in the Web Sites section. Note that for your site to be listed in Yahoo!, it has to come up in the Web Sites section. If it is listed in the Web Pages section but not in the Web Sites section, it means that your site is listed in Google, not Yahoo!. If your site is already listed but you are not satisfied with the listing, read the last section of this article on changing your site’s listing in Yahoo!.

Assuming that your site is not listed, your objective is to get your site a high ranking in the Web Sites section. Here are the factors which influence the ranking of your site in the Web Sites section:

i) Presence of the keyword or a part of the keyword somewhere in the name of the category or in the name of a higher level category.

ii) Click Popularity: The concept of click popularity means that when a user searches for something in Yahoo!, it tries to find out which sites satisfied the user’s needs. It does this by keeping track of two things: a) which sites the user clicked on among the sites displayed in the results and b) how much time the user spent in those sites. The logic behind this is that if a user clicked on a particular site and spent a lot of time in that site, that site must have satisfied the user’s needs and hence, must be relevant to that particular keyword. In this case, the site’s click popularity for that keyword improves and so does its ranking for that keyword. But, if a user did not go to a particular site, or returned to Yahoo! soon after going to that site, that site must not be providing relevant information for that particular keyword. In this case, the site’s click popularity for that keyword declines and so does its ranking for that keyword.

So, how do you ensure that your site’s click popularity is high? Some people have suggested that you can improve the click popularity of your site by regularly searching for the keywords that are applicable for your site, clicking on your site’s listing in Yahoo!, and then by not going back to Yahoo!. They have also suggested that you can click on a competitor’s listing in Yahoo! and then can immediately click on the browser’s Back button to go back to Yahoo!, so that Yahoo! thinks that this site did not satisfy the user’s needs and hence gives it a lower ranking. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is this method unethical, it is also ineffective. Yahoo! keeps track of the I.P. address (i.e. the unique address which identifies a computer on the Internet) of its visitors. It ignores repeated clicks on the same site from the same I.P. address. It also uses cookies to track the activities of its visitors. Of course, if you are using a dialup connection to the Internet and your Internet Service Provider assigns you with a dynamic I.P address, you can get around this restriction by disconnecting your computer from the Internet and then again logging in and by deleting the cookies. But, forgetting for a moment the sheer amount of time that you would need to spend doing this, remember that Yahoo! gets millions of visitors every day. How much influence can a single person have in such a situation?

There are only two ways of improving the click popularity of your site – the description of your site in Yahoo! needs to be attractive and you need to build an excellent web site with great content which satisfies your visitor’s needs so that they stay longer in your site.

iii) Presence of the keyword or a part of the keyword in the Title and Description – If you want to rank highly for a keyword, the Title and the Description that you use to submit your site to Yahoo! should contain the keyword. Note that this Title is not the title that you have used in the home page of your web site and that this Description is not the description that you have used in the Meta Description tag of your home page. Rather, it is the Title and the Description of your site’s listing in Yahoo!.

An important point to note here is that Yahoo! searches for strings rather than words. This means that if one of the individual words of the keyword is embedded inside another word, this will still boost your rankings. For instance, if the keywords applicable for your site contain the word Australia, but the description of your site in Yahoo! contains the word Australian, the fact that the string Australia is present inside the word Australian will be taken into consideration when your site is ranked.

iv) Prominence of the keyword in the Title and the Description – “Prominence” means how close the keyword is to the beginning of the Title and Description. Other things remaining the same, closer the keyword to the beginning of the Title and the Description, higher your ranking.

v) Presence of the keyword or a part of the keyword in the URL – You will get a slightly higher ranking if the keyword or a part of the keyword is also present in the URL of your site.

Now we come to the Title for your site. The Title is important not only because the presence of a keyword in the Title helps to boost the ranking of your site, but also because sites in the various categories in Yahoo! are listed alphabetically according to the Title. However, Yahoo! insists that the Title should always be the official name of your site. Hence, short of changing the official name of your site, there is not much you can do about the Title.

Now we come to how you should write the description of your site. When you write the description, your aim should be to make the Yahoo! editor’s job as easy as possible. You should not give the editor the feeling that he/she needs to edit your description in any way. The moment an editor starts to edit your description, you risk having your keywords removed from your description or worse, having it changed in a way which does not reflect the content of your site.

Your description should be a single sentence which conveys what your site is all about and contains the two keywords you are targeting as close as possible to the beginning of the description. However, your description should not just be a list of keywords – the description that you use should be a proper sentence and should be grammatically correct. It should also be attractive to your visitors so that they actually click on it, which will improve the click popularity of your site, and hence its ranking in Yahoo!.

Broadly, here are the rules that you should remember when forming the description:

i) Make sure that the description can tell a visitor what your site is all about. Things like “Have a look at our site” or “Welcome to my site” does not tell a visitor what your site does.

ii) Avoid hype of any sort. Avoid using ALL CAPS or exclamation marks. Phrases like “The best web site dealing with widgets!!” or “Offers the BEST QUALITY, CHEAPEST WIDGETS you can find anywhere” are inappropriate.

iii) Don’t capitalize any word in your description – not even the first word. For some reason, Yahoo! prefers that the first word of your description is not capitalized. If you look at the sites in any Yahoo! category, you will find that almost none of them have the first word capitalized. Of course, if some of the words in the description are proper nouns, then you should capitalize them.

iv) Write the description in the third person. Don’t say “We offer financial planning and credit counseling services”, say “offers financial planning and credit counseling services.”.

v) Don’t make your description too long – limit yourself to 10 words at the most. If you are lucky, you may be able to get accepted with a description longer than 10 words. However, longer the description, higher the probability that the editor will want to edit it.

vi) Check your description for typos and grammatical mistakes.

vii) End your description with a period. If the editor has to add the period to the end of your description, she may also end up editing the description, which is not what you want. Your aim is to have the editor accept the exact description that you had written in order to ensure that your keywords are not removed from the description.

Now that you know the description that you should use, it is time to establish the category to which you should submit your site. First of all, you need to determine whether your site is regionally specific. If your site is applicable to a specific geographic region, then you should submit your site to the appropriate Regional Category in Yahoo!. However, if your site is not specific to a particular region, then your site should be listed in one of the main Yahoo! categories.

Now, if your site is commercial in nature (i.e. if it sells a product or service) and is not regionally specific, it belongs somewhere under the Business and Economy > Shopping and Services or Business and Economy > Business to Business categories. If your site is targeted towards individual consumers, then your site needs to be under the Shopping and Services category. If your site is targeted towards other businesses, it needs to be in the Business to Business category.

If your site is both commercial in nature and regionally specific, your site needs to be under the Business and Economy > Shopping and Services or Business and Economy > Business to Business category of the relevant regional category.

With this background, let’s see how you can determine the appropriate category for your site. Simply search for the two keywords which you have determined earlier. Go through all the categories which the top ranking sites belong to. Note down the category (or categories) which contain sites which are very similar to yours. In many cases, there will only be one category which contains sites similar to yours. In that case, this is the category to which you should submit your site. If you find that there is more than one category which contains sites similar to yours, and if you are convinced that all these categories are applicable for your site, select the two categories which contain the least number of sites. Your primary category will be the one with the least number of sites. The secondary category will obviously be the other category.

Now, create a text file in which you can record the details of your submission. Note down the date when you are submitting, the URL of your web site, the Title and the Description of your site as well as the URLs of the category (or the 2 categories) which are applicable for your site. Now go to the URL of the Primary category for your site, click on the Suggest a Site link at the bottom of the page and follow the instructions there. (If that category does not have a Suggest a Site link, then it means that it is a very general category to which new sites cannot be added.) Instead of submitting your site right away, I recommend that you first use a dummy, non-existent site to know the questions that Yahoo! is going to ask you. Note down the answers to these questions in the text file so that you can paste them later when you are actually submitting your site. Of course, don’t actually submit the dummy site by clicking on the final submission button – just use it to get an idea of the questions that Yahoo! will ask you.

Of particular importance is the box where Yahoo! asks for some additional information about your site. If you have identified an additional category which is applicable for your site, mention something like “My site also belongs to” and then give the URL of the additional category.

Once you have noted down the answers to all the questions that Yahoo! is going to ask you, double check everything present in the text file to ensure that there are no mistakes and that all the URLs (i.e. the URLs of the categories as well as the URL of your site) are working correctly. It is very difficult to change your site’s listing in Yahoo! once you get listed, and hence, you need to ensure that you do everything correctly the first time. Then, offer a prayer to Goddess Yahoo! , go to the URL of the primary category for your site, click on the Suggest a Site link listed at the bottom and submit your site. Make sure that you follow all the instructions that are mentioned here to the absolute letter.

Now, remember that if yours is a commercial site and is not regionally specific, it must be under the Business and Economy > Shopping and Services or Business and Economy > Business to Business categories of the main Yahoo! directory. Yahoo! no longer offers a free submission option for sites under these two categories – you have no choice but to pay them $299 for the Business Express submission option. For more information on this, go to their How to Suggest a Business Express Site page. Read the instructions and terms and conditions of the Business Express submission in order to ensure that your site is eligible. Paying them $299 does not guarantee you a listing and your site is not given any preference in its rankings. Using the Business Express option merely guarantees that your site will be reviewed within 7 days and that, in case it is not accepted, you will be told why your site was not accepted. You shall also have a chance of appealing a rejection within 30 days. Of course, all the instructions regarding choosing a proper description and choosing a correct category are still applicable.

If your site does not belong to these two categories, you can either submit your site for free, or you can use the Business Express submission option. I recommend that you first try to get your site listed for free. Use the Business Express option as a last resort.

Once you have finished submitting, don’t delete the text file – you will need it later when you want to again submit to Yahoo! (in case you are not accepted the first time).

What to do if your site is not accepted

This section is intended for those who have used the free submission and have not been listed. In case you have used the paid submission and have been rejected, see the next section.

Unless you are very lucky, if you have used the free submission, your site may not be accepted in your first attempt. If your site is not accepted within 1 month from the time that you submitted it, submit it again using the same instructions as above. If your site is still not accepted 1 month after the second submission, some people have suggested that you write to a special Yahoo! address – url-support@yahoo-inc.com. However, in my personal experience, writing to this address has not been effective. Instead, here’s what you should do:

I have accidentally discovered the email address of an actual editor of Yahoo!. Her name is Rosie Skaw and her email address is rosie@yahoo-inc.com. I am mentioning her email address here with the understanding that no one abuses it. This method works but it is not one of the familiar “back doors to Yahoo!” that one often gets to hear of (believe me, there are no back doors to Yahoo!). This email address should be used only after you have tried to submit your site to Yahoo! at least twice using the steps outlined earlier and have failed.

After submitting your site twice, if you still don’t manage to get listed, write a very polite email to Rosie. Introduce yourself, tell her that you have been trying to submit your site to Yahoo! and have failed. Give her the details of your last submission – when you submitted it, the URL of your site, the Title and the Description that you used as well as the category (or categories) to which you submitted your site. If you have a unique product or service that not many other web sites listed in Yahoo! are offering, mention it. Or, if you provide lots of articles and tips related to your business, mention that too. You can also point her to the testimonials that you have received. Request her (very politely) to evaluate your site and add it to Yahoo! if she finds your site appropriate.

Once you have sent the email to Rosie, wait another month or so to see if you get listed. If you still can’t get listed, don’t send her any more emails. Yahoo! provides a phone number for listing support. The number is 408-731-3333. Call this number and leave a message mentioning your URL and the date when you last submitted and requesting (again, very politely) that your site be listed.

If the phone call does not get you listed, consider writing to Yahoo! at

Yahoo! Corporation
3420 Central Expressway,
2nd floor Santa Clara, CA 95051, USA

In this case too, mention your URL, the date when you last submitted, the Title and Description that you used and the category to which you submitted. Don’t forget to mention the fact that you are selling a unique product or that you provide lots of articles or that you have received glowing testimonials from users.

If you still can’t get your site listed, and you are convinced that your site deserves to get into Yahoo! and that you have followed all the rules, you should then use the Business Express submission option.

What to do if your Business Express submission is rejected

A common reason for Yahoo! rejecting a site when it has used the Business Express submission option is lack of original content. If you get a message from Yahoo! that your site was rejected because of a lack of unique content, then your site may either be full of affiliate links and nothing else, or it may be a 1 page direct response sales site. In the former case, as I mentioned, your site cannot hope to get listed. In the latter case, you need to divide up your sales message into multiple pages. Consider adding a few articles and tips related to your site. Then, send a polite reply to Yahoo! thanking them for their constructive feedback. Point out the fact that after receiving the feedback, you have added the articles and tips. Be specific here – tell them the exact URLs which contains these articles. Then request them to review your site again and add it, if they find it appropriate.

Another reason that they may say that your site lacks original content is that you already have another site listed in Yahoo! and are trying to get a new site listed. If the two sites have essentially the same content, then you will definitely be rejected. However, even if the two sites have substantially different content, you may still be rejected. In this case, there is no point in appealing the rejection – Yahoo! will definitely reject your site again when you appeal.Ê

Instead, what you can try doing is to remove all links from the new site to the old site (and vice-versa) and ensuring that the design of the new site is also completely different from the old site and that no part of the content of the old site is present in the new site (and vice-versa). Then, wait 2-3 months, and again submit the new site to Yahoo! using its Business Express submission.

Another common reason for the rejection of sites is that in Yahoo!’s opinion, the site is still under construction. If you are convinced that your site does not contain missing graphics, links leading to empty or non-existent pages, “Under construction” symbols etc., then a common reason for Yahoo! saying that the site is under construction is that the site cannot be properly viewed under Netscape. Yahoo! editors generally use Netscape and hence, it is vitally important that your site be accessible using Netscape. You need to ensure that your site can be viewed properly in Netscape v3.0 and above. In order to see how your site looks under different browsers, go to anybrowser.com. Once you have ensured that your site is accessible under Netscape, send a polite reply to their rejection note thanking them for their constructive feedback and then stating that the site no longer contains any elements under construction. Then request them to review your site again and add it, if they find it appropriate.

How to change your site’s listing in Yahoo!

If getting your site listed in Yahoo! is tough, changing your site’s listing is a Herculean task. Firstly, note that Yahoo! does not care about the ranking of your site. Hence, if you are trying to submit some minor changes to the description with a view of getting a higher ranking, you are unlikely to be successful. You should only think about trying to change your listing if

a) the URL of your site has changed, or
b) the official name of your site has changed (and hence the Title of your listing should change), or
c) Yahoo! has accidentally listed your site without a Description, or
d) the Description contains a typo, or
e) Yahoo! has placed you in a totally inappropriate category, or
f) the nature of your site has changed and the current description does not reflect the new nature of your site.

The URL for changing your site’s listing is http://add.yahoo.com/fast/change Read the instructions thoroughly before submitting your change request. In the last text box, provide solid reasons as to why your site’s listing should be changed.

If you can’t get your site’s listing changed within 1 month from the time that you have submitted your request, try submitting your request again. If you still can’t get your listing changed within 1 month from the second request, follow the procedures outlined in the section on what to do if your site can’t get into Yahoo! using the free submission. However, don’t submit a change request using the Business Express submission – Yahoo! specifically forbids that.

Wrapping things up:

Once you have got your site into Yahoo! (they will send you an email if you are accepted), your site will be added to Yahoo!’s What’s New section. Furthermore, your site will be marked as new and will be placed at the top of the category (or categories) for 1 week from the time that your site is first listed. This placement at the top of the category can bring in quite a few visitors to your site every day. After the first week, the position of your site in the categories will be according to the alphabetical ranking of your Title. This will generally be accompanied by a decrease in the number of visitors to your site from Yahoo!.

Are you spending more money on your Yellow Pages ads than Internet marketing?  Why?  Do more of your customers use the yellow pages than the Internet?

If you’re in any high-tech industry, this is old news to you. But, if you’re selling consumer products to a local market and still think that the two-color, half-page ad you are running in your local yellow pages directory is a justifiably better marketing spend than spending a little bit of money on your Internet presence, you may want to reconsider.

Pretend it’s 7:42 p.m. on a Wednesday and your heat just stopped working (its cold today in Boston).  You pull up Google to search for “heating repair, city”. Two seconds later, you get a list of company names, addresses, phone numbers, maps, and website URLs. Just like that, you’ve instantly found what you wanted, without even thinking about where you keep the yellow pages.

Do you even have a yellow pages in your home or office?

This is a common scenario used to establish how integral search engines has become in our daily lives.  But what about the online versions of yellow pages?  Here is some other evidence for you. In a September 2007 article written by Chris Smith for Search Engine Land, the trends he sites clearly show a decline in Internet Yellow Pages usage while search engine traffic continues to soar.

Chris writes, “It’s my opinion that Google’s (and other top search engine) innovations in local search combined with increasing inclusion of business listing data in the search engine results pages (“SERPs”) is causing users’ behavior to change. Users are finding more and more the information they’re seeking directly in SERPs, negating the need to find Internet Yellow Pages.”

To many marketers serving a local-area target market, search engine optimization and pay-per-click marketing can be scary, expensive territory. The great thing with all the different ways to get started in search engine marketing is that you can start simple and low cost and work your way up from there.  For search engine optimization you can use the free SEO tool Website Grader, and for Google Adwords you can set your ads to only show up in a local area and pick a daily limit to your spending to manage your budget.  Before you get started, just make sure you understand the difference between paid and organic search.  Finally, you should also read this article about Free Google Advertising- it is a must for any local business.

In this new world of marketing, outbound marketing strategies just don’t hold up when compared to inbound marketing practices – things like SEO, PPC, and becoming an active participant in the blogosphere and social media.  The better you become at working all facets of inbound marketing, the more likely you are to show up on the first page of Google.

Getting your site an optimum listing in the Open Directory (DMOZ) is vitally important as far as search engine positioning is concerned. AOL, Netscape & Lycos all take their results from the Open Directory. Google gives a lot of importance to sites being listed in the Open Directory. In addition to this, getting registered by the Open Directory will also help you improve the link popularity of your site.

In this article, we focus on how you can get your site an optimum listing in the Open Directory so that your site gets a high ranking in the search engines which use results from the Open Directory. Even if your site is already listed in the Open Directory, you should read this article to find out how you can get multiple listings in the Open Directory.

Before you submit your site, go through your entire site and ensure that there are no missing graphics, no links leading to empty or non-existent pages and no “Under construction” symbols. Also, check for typos and grammatical errors. Furthermore, your site must provide good content. If your site simply contains links to various affiliate programs, you will find it difficult to get through. The Open Directory does not mind sites containing links to affiliate programs, as long as you provide proper content.

Now, we need to review the factors that AOL, Netscape and Lycos use to rank sites from the Open Directory. You should not be too worried about the ranking of your site in the Open Directory itself – not too many people use the Open Directory for finding information. However, the algorithm that the Open Directory uses is similar to the algorithm that Netscape uses, and hence a high ranking in Netscape generally means a high ranking in the Open Directory and vice-versa.

Before we begin reviewing the factors influencing the ranking of your site, you need to select the two most important keywords for your site based on their popularity. If you don’t yet know the keywords which are applicable for your site, have a look at my article on “Choosing the correct keywords for your site”. In this article, I have mentioned that while selecting the keywords for your site, you should look at both the popularity of the keywords as well as their competitiveness. However, for the purpose of this article, don’t worry about the competitiveness – select keywords only on the basis of popularity.

Broadly, here are the factors which influence your rankings in AOL, Netscape and Lycos:

i) Presence of the keyword in the Title and Description

If you want to rank highly for a keyword, the Title and the Description that you use to submit your site to the Open Directory should contain the keyword. Note that this Title is not the Title that you have used in the home page of your web site and that this Description is not the description that you have used in the Meta Description tag of your home page. Rather, it is the Title and the Description of your site’s listing in the Open Directory.

ii) Prominence of the keyword in the Title and the Description

“Prominence” means how close the keyword is to the beginning of the Title and Description. Other things remaining the same, closer the keyword to the beginning of the Title and the Description, higher your ranking.

iii) Presence of the keyword in the URL

Other things remaining the same, your site will get a higher ranking if a keyword or a part of the keyword is present in the URL of your site.

iv) Presence of the keyword in the Category name

In Netscape, other things remaining the same, if the keyword is present in the name of the Category, your site will get a higher ranking. Even if only a part of the keyword is present in the name of the category, your site will get a higher ranking. Note that this is applicable only in Netscape.

v) Number of sites in a category which contain the keyword in their descriptions

In Netscape, other things remaining the same, more the number of sites in a category which contain the keyword in their descriptions, higher the ranking for all sites in that category. Once again, this is applicable only in Netscape.

Now, as you can see from points i) and ii), if your site has to be ranked at the top for a particular keyword, the keyword needs to be present in the Title. However, the Open Directory insists that the Title be the official name of your site.

Hence, unless the official name of your site contains the keywords, you have little or no choice with respect to the Title. Short of changing the official name of your site, there is not much that you can do.

Now, assuming that your target keyword is not present in the official name of your site, search AOL for the keywords which you had selected and find out if the top 10 sites in AOL all have the keyword in the Title. If they do, your site will not be able to get a high ranking for those keywords. In this case, select two more keywords based on their popularity and again search AOL for those keywords. If the top 10 sites all contain the keyword, reject the keywords and select the next two keywords. In this way, find out two keywords for which the top 10 sites don’t contain the keyword in the Title.

Of course, if the official name of your site contains the keywords, then you are in luck! This means that your Title will contain the keywords and there is a good chance that you will get a high ranking for those keywords.

Now we come to how you should write the description of your site. When you write the description, your aim should be to make the Open Directory editor’s job as easy as possible. You should not give the editor the feeling that he/she needs to edit your description in any way. The moment an editor starts to edit your description, you risk having your keywords removed from your description.

Your description should be a single sentence which conveys what your site is all about and contains the two keywords you are targeting as close as possible to the beginning of the description. However, your description should not just be a list of keywords – the description that you use should be a proper sentence and should be grammatically correct.

Broadly, here are the rules that you should remember when forming the description:

i) Make sure that the description can tell a visitor what your site is all about. Things like “Have a look at our site” or “Welcome to my site” does not tell a visitor what your site does.

ii) Avoid hype of any sort. Avoid using ALL CAPS or exclamation marks. Phrases like “The best web site dealing with widgets!!” or “Offers the BEST QUALITY, CHEAPEST WIDGETS you can find anywhere” are inappropriate.

iii) Don’t capitalize every word in your description – capitalize only the first word. Of course, if some of the words in the description are proper nouns, then you should capitalize them.

iv) Write the description in the third person. Don’t say “We offer financial planning and credit counseling services”, say “Offers financial planning and credit counseling services.”.

v) Don’t make your description too long – limit yourself to 15 words at the most. If you are lucky, you may be able to get accepted with a description longer than 15 words. However, longer the description, higher the probability that the editor will want to edit it.

vi) Check your description for typos and grammatical mistakes.

vii) End your description with a period. If the editor has to add the period to the end of your description, she may also end up editing the description, which is not what you want. Your aim is to have the editor accept the exact description that you had written in order to ensure that your keywords are not removed from the description.

Now, we come to how you can select the right category for your site. Go to the Open Directory, and search for the two keywords you have established. Does a particular category come up at the top for both the keywords? If so, go to that category, and see whether the sites present in the category are similar to yours. Also see whether that category has a Description and/or a FAQ. Read them and find out whether that category is applicable for your site. If so, this is the category you should submit your site to.

If different categories come up at the top for the two keywords, go through all the categories and find out which is the most appropriate category among the different categories.

For some keywords, you will find that the Open Directory does not display any categories. In this case, find out which category most of the top sites belong to and submit your site to that category, assuming it is applicable for your site.

Once you have selected the right category, click on the “add URL” link at the top. Type in the address of your site in the first text box, the official name of your site in the next text box, the description that you have earlier developed in the third text box and your email address in the fourth text box. Although the Open Directory says that including the email address is optional, I would recommend that you include it – if, for some reason, your site is not accepted, the Open Directory editor may want to tell you why your site has not been accepted.

What to do if your site is not accepted

After submitting your site, go to the category where you have submitted your site every day and see when your site gets listed. If you find that your site is not in that category, it may so happen that you have been placed in a different category. Type in your domain name in Open Directory’s search box and see whether your site comes up in the results. I have seen some sites getting accepted within 1 day and some sites in about 2-3 weeks.

If your site has not been listed after three weeks, then re-submit it to the same category and wait for another three weeks. If your site is still not accepted, then have a look at your site again. Does it contain any missing images or links, links to empty pages or under construction signs? Does it provide good content? Does it have any spelling or grammatical errors?

If you are absolutely convinced that your site is eligible for being accepted by the Open Directory, then the fact that your site is not being accepted may signify one of two things:

i) The editor of that category is inactive, i.e. he/she has not been reviewing sites for a long time.

ii) He/she is your competitor, and does not want to list you.

In this case, the first step is to write to the editor of the category. Scroll down to the bottom of the category to which you are trying to submit your site and click on the name of the editor. If that category does not have an editor, go to the category above that in the hierarchy. For instance, suppose you are trying to submit to the Computers: Consultants: Business Systems category. At the time of writing of this article, that category did not have an editor. In this case, you should go to the Computers: Consultants category and click on one of the editors there. Click on the “Send to editorname” link, and in the Comments field, write a very polite message to the editor. Tell her that you have been trying to submit your site to the Open Directory and you have been unsuccessful. Give her the complete details of your submission, i.e. the category to which you submitted, your URL, the Title and the Description that you used and the dates on which you submitted. Ask her as to whether there are any mistakes that you are making and whether she would be kind enough to point out the mistakes to you so that you can correct them.

If, after two weeks, you don’t get any reply from the editor and are not accepted into the Open Directory, then look for another category which is applicable for your site using the method outlined earlier and submit your site to this category.

Getting Multiple Listings in the Open Directory

If you have already got your site listed in the Open Directory, you may try and get your site some additional listings in it. Begin by selecting two keywords which are different from the keywords for which you are already ranked well. Then try and locate another category which is applicable for your site and submit your site there with a new description which contains the two new keywords you have selected.

If you are lucky, you may be able to get a listing in this new category, especially if the editor of this category is different from the editor of the category where your site is already listed. Again, if the second category to which you want to submit your site is a regional category (i.e. a category applicable to the geographical region in which your company is located), that again improves your chance of getting a second listing. Alternatively, if you were originally listed in one of the regional categories, then getting your site listed in one of the general categories is also possible, assuming that the products or services you are selling are not intended for a regional market only.

However, you have a much better chance of getting a second listing if you submit one of the internal pages of your site to a different category (assuming you can locate a category which is applicable for that particular page), rather than again submitting the home page. For instance, if you type in 1stSearchRanking.com in Open Directory’s search box, you will notice that my site has four listings – the home page of my site, the page linking to all my articles, the page which describes my newsletter on search engine positioning and this page on submitting sites to the Open Directory.

Submitting an internal page has the benefit that the Title no longer needs to be the official name of your site. This allows you to include keywords in the Title. For instance, the listing for the page containing my articles has the title of “Search Engine Positioning Articles”, which, of course, has no relation to the name of my company – 1st Search Engine Ranking.com. Before submitting one of the internal pages of your site, you should change the title of the page (here, by “title”, I mean the Title tag of the page, i.e. the Title that is displayed at the top of the browser window when the page is opened) to the Title that you want the page to be listed under in the Open Directory. This improves the chance that the Open Directory editor will accept the title that you had submitted.

However, don’t go overboard with submitting internal pages – you can be penalized for spamming. Don’t start submitting any doorway pages that you have created – they will be rejected. Any internal page that you submit must provide some unique content and must be relevant to the category to which you want to submit the page.

Today I want to share with you an interesting and profitable way
to make money on the internet with very low efforts: affiliate
marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is a popular method of promoting web
businesses in which you are rewarded for every visitor,
subscriber and customer provided through your efforts, much like
the practice of paying finder’s-fees for the introduction of new
clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a
certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay
per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per
Sale), or any combination of the three.

Affiliate marketing works well for both the company selling the
product and the affiliate because both parties make money in the
process and each helps the other become more successful.

Read below to learn more, then make sure to scroll down to our
TODAY’S INSTANT MONEY TIP section to read my step-by-step guide
to find your online goldmine in affiliate marketing.

First, let’s take a look at the overall concept of Affiliate
Marketing. The process starts when a company has a successful
product to offer. The company will build a web site and offer
that product to the consumer. The next hurdle the company has to
overcome is getting web traffic to their site. After all, they
can have a kick-butt product but if nobody knows about it, they
won’t make a dime. This is where you, the affiliate marketer
comes into play.

When you signup for any affiliate program, you will receive a
special link that keeps track of the visitors you refer as an
affiliate. Now, your main goal is to redirect as much targeted
traffic as you can so you can raise your profits. There are two
ways for this: you will have to build a web site that generates
traffic and then “refer” part of that traffic to a partner
company, or you can buy targeted traffic from a reliable source
and redirect it to the website you are affiliated with. At
Revisitors.com, we have thousands of online entrepreneurs that
buy our targeted traffic (starting at $19,95) and redirect it to
an affiliate website, earning MUCH MORE than their investment.
The return on investment (ROI) for this type of opportunity is
usually very high, and it’s definitely worth a try.

The most common way to earn money by referring people to a
website as an affiliate is the Cost Per Lead (CPL) commission
structure. This is also the most used method by customers who
buy Revisitors targeted traffic and redirect it to the website
they are affiliated with.  A CPL program is advantageous because
you simply need to convince your traffic to provide their
information to your partner company. In other words, a cost per
lead affiliate program will pay for each person or “lead” that
is referred to your partner’s web site. A Lead is any personal
information that a visitor submits to a company for the purpose
of allowing the company to solicit their product or services.

Here is a rough example: Let’s say that a company offering a
“make money with affiliate marketing ebook” makes an average of
$50.00 profit from each sale made on their web site. They know,
based off of web site statistics and sales, that one in four
customers will buy their product or “convert” as it is commonly
referred to. They can then offer an affiliate a certain amount
of money (we will use $20.00 for our example) for each person
they refer to their web site that generates a lead. So, if an
affiliate gets 100 people each month to click on an ad and fill
in their information on the company’s web site they would make
$2000.00. The company would have made $5,000 from the referrals
and it will have only cost them the $2000.00. Again, both the
company and the affiliate succeed in with this method because
the company has extra sales it would not have had without the
home based affiliate business and the affiliate gets paid for a
product they do not manage or own. Now, I don’t know about you
but as for myself, I don’t mind having an extra $2000.00 each
month from a website that maintains itself. Imagine having
10 web sites that all do the same thing for different affiliate
programs.

Today I want to share with you an interesting and profitable way
to make money on the internet with very low efforts: affiliate
marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is a popular method of promoting web
businesses in which you are rewarded for every visitor,
subscriber and customer provided through your efforts, much like
the practice of paying finder’s-fees for the introduction of new
clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a
certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay
per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per
Sale), or any combination of the three.

Affiliate marketing works well for both the company selling the
product and the affiliate because both parties make money in the
process and each helps the other become more successful.

Read below to learn more, then make sure to scroll down to our
TODAY’S INSTANT MONEY TIP section to read my step-by-step guide
to find your online goldmine in affiliate marketing.

First, let’s take a look at the overall concept of Affiliate
Marketing. The process starts when a company has a successful
product to offer. The company will build a web site and offer
that product to the consumer. The next hurdle the company has to
overcome is getting web traffic to their site. After all, they
can have a kick-butt product but if nobody knows about it, they
won’t make a dime. This is where you, the affiliate marketer
comes into play.

When you signup for any affiliate program, you will receive a
special link that keeps track of the visitors you refer as an
affiliate. Now, your main goal is to redirect as much targeted
traffic as you can so you can raise your profits. There are two
ways for this: you will have to build a web site that generates
traffic and then “refer” part of that traffic to a partner
company, or you can buy targeted traffic from a reliable source
and redirect it to the website you are affiliated with. At
Revisitors.com, we have thousands of online entrepreneurs that
buy our targeted traffic (starting at $19,95) and redirect it to
an affiliate website, earning MUCH MORE than their investment.
The return on investment (ROI) for this type of opportunity is
usually very high, and it’s definitely worth a try.

The most common way to earn money by referring people to a
website as an affiliate is the Cost Per Lead (CPL) commission
structure. This is also the most used method by customers who
buy Revisitors targeted traffic and redirect it to the website
they are affiliated with.  A CPL program is advantageous because
you simply need to convince your traffic to provide their
information to your partner company. In other words, a cost per
lead affiliate program will pay for each person or “lead” that
is referred to your partner’s web site. A Lead is any personal
information that a visitor submits to a company for the purpose
of allowing the company to solicit their product or services.

Here is a rough example: Let’s say that a company offering a
“make money with affiliate marketing ebook” makes an average of
$50.00 profit from each sale made on their web site. They know,
based off of web site statistics and sales, that one in four
customers will buy their product or “convert” as it is commonly
referred to. They can then offer an affiliate a certain amount
of money (we will use $20.00 for our example) for each person
they refer to their web site that generates a lead. So, if an
affiliate gets 100 people each month to click on an ad and fill
in their information on the company’s web site they would make
$2000.00. The company would have made $5,000 from the referrals
and it will have only cost them the $2000.00. Again, both the
company and the affiliate succeed in with this method because
the company has extra sales it would not have had without the
home based affiliate business and the affiliate gets paid for a
product they do not manage or own. Now, I don’t know about you
but as for myself, I don’t mind having an extra $2000.00 each
month from a website that maintains itself. Imagine having
10 web sites that all do the same thing for different affiliate
programs.

In a recent report by Peter Horrocks, Director of BBC World Service, it is clear that as society becomes more networked, the fortress mentality of the mainstream media is increasingly under siege by social media, but they are adapting. There’s a lesson for us all in this.

For so long now, Web 2.0 has been working in the background to subtly but unwittingly undermine mainstream media, especially in America where, for example, RSS is understood and used far more readily than in most other nations. In this, the role of the “fortress journalism” is being steadily eroded as the nature of RSS feeds allow you to choose the BBC for video news, the New York Times for international news, the Guardian for ecological reports and ESPN for sports – so storming the gates of the fortress has been around for some time, but it is only now that publishers are seriously looking at new dissemination models in a more integrated and enlightened manner.

The main problem for the newspaper industry is that journalists have been very slow to recognise the changes that have been happening under their noses, and whilst the major players have all installed news feeds on their websites, they still continue with the assumption that their news product provides a complete set of information for their readers.

owever, it is all too easy to sit back and mock the fortress mentality as outdated but these organisations have always protected good journalism and have also sheltered and given legal protection to journalists from the likes of powerful businessmen and politicians.

So, simply replacing fortresses is not how it is being thought through. As modern society becomes ever more highly networked, the fortress is opening up and is lowering the drawbridge to allow the public inside its walls.

The BBC’s Peter Horrocks states in a recent 92-page document, The Future of Journalism: “Reducing effort in any journalistic section is anathema to the old fortress mindset. Even more disturbingly, it might also mean co-operating explicitly. If the BBC is best in news video and the Telegraph best in text sports reports, why shouldn’t they syndicate that content to each other and save effort?”

By better understanding the medium of change, journalists have their role to play: while the public are still demanding diversity and choice, they also want powerful features and editing that journalism provides best.

What we cannot do away with is investigative reporting and analysis. Now, more than ever before, news organisations need to invest their talents intelligently in and amongst the new media web platforms, or they risk being ignored by an ever-growing number of young people for whom television and newspapers are irrelevant.

So journalism is changing and with it, social media: it is now about being permeable, interactive, 24/7, multi-platform and converged. The best approach and leverage for businesses using Twitter is by providing valuable information to your consumer base via links to relevant articles and helpful advice. And in time your “followers” may well make up your real “customer base”; it is far too early as yet to predict.

New media and Twitter in particular is a wake-up call for all mainstream media outlets and as SEMs, we lead the charge in that we inhabit their world to the extent that we blog, write articles and tweet.

So, on a regular basis, we should aim to:

1. Write about your industry in a way that is useful to your audience, especially with articles. Keep on subject and submit it to the major article sites. If your blog has an associated RSS feed, such as WordPress, all the better. Enter it in the major social media sites as well. Then Tweet it.

2. Twitter is in its infancy, albeit a precocious little chap, and you may see no point in publishing your story as your “followers” are mainly unknown to you and therefore unlikely to read about what you have to say. Do not be deterred as this is the wrong approach: Twitter is here to stay and develop. If the Economist is backing Twitter against CNN, this medium has to be taken seriously.

3. Blogging and article writing should be done regularly. Just writing the odd story on a casual basis is not good enough. You should be consistent in the posting your articles and thorough with your research.

However, in the world of Web 2.0, the choices available for a total news information set is beginning to change journalists’ collective mindset: as Jeff Jarvis, Professor of Interactive Journalism at the City University of New York, described it: “Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.”

Social media websites now have millions of users using Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and, with the immediacy of Twitter alerts, this is now what news consumers are tuning in to.

In a recent article by the Economist, Twitter 1, CNN 0 on the protests in Iran, 10.5 million American TV viewers turned to CNN, but instead of protests many of them saw a repeat of Larry King interviewing “burly motorcycle-builders”. The article went on to illustrate a typical post: “Iran went to hell. Media went to bed“.

This realisation is already transforming the face of journalism, which means building public participation in generating user content and making a paradigm shift from being a “manufacturing industry” to becoming a “service industry”.

But this too has its drawbacks as, without moderation, blog commenting can often descend into a low common denominator that is sometimes determined by tasteless or asinine comments. In one such instance, a group of aboriginal leaders from Canada requested that hate charges be laid against CBC because of some poorly-moderated user comments which escaped into the public domain.

This is the last part of my “5 Ways To Boost Your Website
Sales” course. Now you know those hidden tips and MUST-DOs
to make your site profitable. But remember: the top,
INDISCUSSED way to earn money with your business is to
invest money in it. And getting a targeted traffic campaign is
definitely the next step to success!

This is the last part of the Revisitors “5 Ways To Boost Your
Website Sales” course.  In this message, I will publish a list
of 25 MUST-DOs to get the ultimate online success. Enjoy!

1: Let people know about your affiliate program. Submit it to
numerous affiliate program directories, announce it in your
e-zine, put it in your sig file, etc.

2: Tell your visitors exactly what you want them to do at your
web site. You may want them to order products, subscribe to your
ezine, etc.

3: Focus your site on your visitor’s desires, not on yourself.
They want to know what’s in it for them, not that you won an
award for your business.

4: Try not to get caught up in loading your site with
technological gizmos and gadgets. Concentrate on your words,
they will do the actual selling.

5: Create your own ad copy; don’t copy the basic run of the mill
ad copy. Don’t be afraid of trying something different to
increase your sales.

6: Change you ads regularly. Your prospects can get bored seeing
the same ad all the time. They usually see the ad 7 times before
they actually buy.

7: Lower your negative word of mouth marketing. You’ll always
have customers that are dissatisfied. Try to please them as much
as possible.

8: Give people a deadline to order. Tell people if they order by
Jun 28, 2007 they will get a discount or free bonuses. This will
create an urgency so they don’t put off buying.

9: Offer people a money back guarantee. The longer the guarantee
the more effective it will be. It could be a 30 day, 60 day, 1
year, or lifetime guarantee.

10: Have some business cards printed up with your web site
address and other business information. Pass them out to people
you meet or that might be interested in your business.

11: Have a magnetic sign made with your web site address and
other business information. Place it on your car door or roof
when you are traveling.

12: Have some flyers printed out with your  web site address and
other business information. Keep a few with you to hang on
bulletin boards you see.

13: Have some pens imprinted with your web site address and
other business information. When you are done filling out your
check or signing receipts leave it there for the next person to
use or keep.

14: Have some mugs imprinted with your web site address and
other business information. Use them when you have company or
give them away to friends as gifts.

15: Write your ad copy like you’re talking directly to your
visitors. Use the words “you”, “your”, and “you’re” a lot in
your ad copy.

16: Create a free ebook directory on a specific topic at your
web site. People will visit your web site to read the free
ebooks and may see your product ad.

17:  Place colorful graphs, pie charts and other charts in your
ad copy. Use charts that will grab a persons eye and also
support your product claims.

18: Highlight buying incentives like free bonuses and money back
guarantees. You could place them in boxes or in front of a
different colored background.

19: Use short sentences or sentence fragments in the body of
your ad copy. A short burst of words can catch a skimmers eye
with one quick glance.

20: Highlight all the important keywords and phrases in your ad
copy. You could use bolding, underlining and color to highlight
the important words.

21: Use a headline that catches the attention of your target
audience. One of the most effective ways is to use a free offer
as your headline.

22: Use attention grabbing adjectives to describe your product.
For example sizzling, incredible, high power, ultramodern,
killer, eye popping, etc. 35.  Survey the people who visit your
web site. You could post a survey or questionnaire on your web
site. Ask visitors what kind of products they would like to see
on the market.

23: You could create a new market for your existing product. For
example, if you’re selling plastic bottles to a pop company, you
could turn around and sell those bottles to a fruit drink
company.

24: Offer a free trial or sample of your product. This increases
the perceived value because people think you’re confident in your
product, so it must be good.

25: Package your product with a lot of bonuses. This increases
the perceived value because people feel they are getting more
for their money.

If you still don’t have a customer list, here is a quick
step-by-step guide to build one fast:

1: Create a page on your website to collect visitors’
information, such as their name and email address. Tell them
that if they signup for your newsletter you’ll give them a free
sample of your product, or some other deal.

2: Buy a Revisitors targeted traffic campaign and redirect the
traffic to the page you built to collect visitors’ information.

3: That’s it. People will signup for your newsletter and will
receive emails from you. Send them monthly newsletters following
the four rules above and they will, sooner or later, buy your
products!