Directory submissions are great ways to help with Search Engine Optimization efforts for a web site which in term helps a site's SERP. This is no news as it is known throughout most SEO communities. However, with all of these new and "so called" gurus claiming that they know anything about them they've also stirred up a lot of confusion behind the truth on "how" to do it correctly for it to help. I've also had my share of take on it previously with directory submission as well.
Through my video today I will explain to you what paid directories, regular directory submission, and directory submission services are in black and white. Without repeating myself from what's been said on the video, one thing to keep reminding yourself is that manual directory submission by yourself is always the best way to go.
Now, the next question that you may have is where or which directories do I submit? Although there are a ton of lists out there, here's a list to help you start:
I'll keep the post short but just check out the video, I think it already explains a lot of it in depth. A lot of how you make money on the web has to do with how you optmize your site and make your audience king! Believe me, besides optimizing your site making audience king is one of the most simple concept in the book and sadly 80% of the web companies or sites are far worse in comparison with regular shops in both maintenance and customer service. - Swapw
Link baiting is a very powerful technique a lot of people talk about over the internet. There are plenty of debates on how to use it and what it is being used for. A lot of so called gurus claimed to have used them in the past but I'll bet you that maybe 10% of them or less are actually successful in what they preach or know.
I have to say it first and foremost that link bait is something that I've used only a hand full of times, but from my studies I've found that they have a profound impact in helping and boosting a blog's popularity including traffic.
From my own experiments, I have found that writing against usually a mainstream view or a mainstream figure to be the most effective way in link baiting. Usually the author advocating an opposite view shows up first at your blog and with it also bringing in their supporters. Now the key here is to have a well constructed argument from your end. With a well constructed argument and a well thought out reasoning can a lot of times swayed the visitors that were going against you to be for you. On top of it, let's say that even if they all disagree with you now you got the attention of many others onto your website and blogs that links to you for the negative purpose of publicizing how wrong you are. For the purpose of link baiting, this would be considered a success. Although it may have a short term negative impact on your website or blog due to your opinion differences, but because of the links that's already in place with all these sites or blogs the benefits are huge. Most of it coming from indirect traffic, mostly visitors of their blog going onto yours. The traffic you'll receive can be exponential.
Now, I don't think link baiting is exactly ethical but the idea is to make sure that some type of buzz is being created for others to know and that your site or blog gets the attention of free press as a result others talking about it; it does exactly that. One precautionary measure that I would advice from my experience is to do some research before you jump into a heated debate. Without valid points to combat accusations from your opponents, you might just dig yourself into a rut. However, by defending yourself successfully would promote your reputation positively and the respects from the original advocates from the other side. It will give you a long lasting effect in traffic boost and buzz from time to time. And as we all know, traffic is the source of income in making money online and I wish the best success with your own results. -Swapw
A lot of times I see SEO or Online Money Making Bloggers keep telling people to focus in advertisement of some sort as an effective way to increase traffic, this is great and all but a lot of times they fail to point out way to retain your traffic which is really the heart of the problem.
Advertisements get you the traffic but to keep the traffic that has came to your site is how well you retain and understand your visitors. For example, when you purchase a computer such as Dell obviously the functionality and how well Dell present its computers to you is very important in making your final decision. However, it is how Dell service you afterwards that retain you as a customer of a lifetime not more advertisements. Let's just say that their customer service is horrible, do you think anyone would go back to Dell although new and fancier advertisements are being presented? Most likely not.
If you consistently get new traffic from different venues of promoting your site, imagine the magnitude of loyal visitors if you keep them all happy? I can tell you as an experienced webmaster that the growth is exponential. Now the next question that you may have in your mind is how do you keep your current visitors happy? The answer to that is simply survey or ask your visitors! You might think, why should I ask my visitors or why would your visitors help you right? Surprisingly enough, from my personal experience visitors are quite informative in telling you exactly what they want and how they want it if you just take the time to ask. An example of a simple survey would be, "what would you prefer to see on my website?" then you offer them different choices that you have in mind and leave the last option up to them to provide a feedback to. Put the survey out for let's say a month, it's probably a good amount of time and most of your loyal readers have probably seen or given you inputs then. Just by looking at the result you can see exactly what's needed to be done in terms of your focus or the needs your visitors coming to your website.
Believe me guys, this advise is golden. A survey takes you only 5 minutes to make, but the impact can fair well steer your site's future as well as improvements based on suggestions directly from your visitors. Making money online a lot of times it is similar to your real life businesses, if you understand your visitors better then your competitors you would then leap out as the leader of the pack instead of a follower or a copy cat. -Swapw
What's Stumbleupon? Stumbleupon is a popular social web site that has a combined idea of Digg and Myspace. Not only will users be able to customize their own spot in Stumbleupon their most fascinating feature to "stumble" really has caused a lot of buzz. Seems like a lot of web gurus have already been talking about them for sometime but I thought I take sometime to dig into them today for you in my personal experience and why I really think they're a great way to drive your traffic. Let's first look at one of their most unique features which they offer is called "stumble". What is stumble? It's kinda like a voting system where users vote for each other on sites or pages and even images which they like throughout the net. Like many other sites that provides users to vote each other Stumbleupon pushes the most voted or popular page in the front page of their website. Obviously as you know, any content that sits on the front page gets viewed by everyone that visits simply because they are the first thing that you see when you come into a site.
How do you "stumble?" Stumbleupon requires users to first download a "stumble" tool which is just another tab on the already cluttered navigation bar which you'll have to install. This is actually the most annoying part for any internet users but if you want to get involved Stumbling others I guess you don't have much choice. The good news is that you can customize the icons being displayed so you can minimize the buttons that you'll have to place in your navigation bar with only the necessities so it won't clog up more spaces then it actually needs. To Stumble on someone's page you have to click on the hands up hand which says "I like it!". By doing so, you have just stumbled on a page or gave the page a vote. Obviously if you don't like a page you can just give that page a hands down which will push the page further back. With this technique you can do it on both the pages you enjoy and the images you enjoy as well. Stumbleupon also offers a regular widget similar to Digg and that just simply enable you to have that function within a post for others to Stumble you as well. Stumbleupon is currently testing their video aspects of the feature and just imagine if it's available on how amazing it would be for video sites like myself to have it being Stumbledupon? Now just get your buddies to start stumbling one another and like I said previously the more buzz you create the more opportunities it will be for you to appear on the front page of Stumbleupon. Before you run out and start going crazy to have others Stumble be sure to first survey the audiences of your niche. Currently, most users of Stumbleupon are quite young so if you are aiming at marketing products for an older group of audience, this is probably not the best idea. Any site like I've said it many times are as good as the visitors that do come, so if your site is well made without visitors go and start stumbling!! The more visitors, the more money you make. That's the game of the internet and that's how you make money smart with advertisements, etc. The best part of having a blog is that it's all free from our end! -Swapw
Social bookmarking is something that most of us get involved with nowadays if you are a blogger. Backtracking myself a little bit, let me first explain to you what a social bookmarking is. A social bookmarking is basically where all the bloggers chunk up in groups to unify themselves therefore visitors of their websites may spread to other bloggers and in the end it increases exposures to everyone that is involved in the social network. You can look at it in similarity to electronics section of Wal-mart, instead of selling just one brand of electronic, there are varieties of electronics for the customers to select thus brings in more audience and exposure.
Out of all the social bookmarking websites, one of the most well known website out there is named DiGG. Why DiGG? Well, beyond just being a place where it gathers bloggers it provides an additional "voting system" for its visitors. In another words, not only will the visitors get to view the blogs in that website it also gets to vote who's got a better blog or story as well. With more votes on the story the better chance it has to get into the front page of DiGG, thus it creates a unforeseen incentive for bloggers to blog better so they can get into the front page of their website. Partially because of pride, partially because it provides maximum exposure for the blogger since that's the reason why they've joined such community in the first place.
Well, you can kinda see where this is going. With more community members come with people that will abuse the idea. Before I get into it, can you think of any ideas to abuse it? The idea is not too complicated and that is to abuse Digg's system of voting for a story. What people end up doing is they've started paying people to vote for their article and thus creating a lot of artificial votes and corrupting the sites' original intent. The front page articles at Digg becomes less quality and basically destroys the system. So, instead of camping with DiGG there's another site which I would like to introduce and that's Netscape. Surprising enough, I don't hear many people talking about it and it is definitely a hidden gem.
Netscape as a site has been around for ages from being an internet browser almost 15 years ago to now a site very similar to Digg. The biggest difference between the two is that with Netscape, you'll have to submit your stories to them instead of installing a widget in your website which others vote on instead. It is very different then Digg in its limiting method for article submissions. Through this limitation however, it allows Netscape to monitor articles that are being submitted and voted thus provide a stronger policing system to prevent abuse. Netscape also provides another type of policing system which allows users to report abuse on the articles or potential abusive activities posted by the user. This is great because no one wants to see others get ahead of them with methods of cheating when they've spent all day writing one thus it provides benefit to those who report abuse. At the end of the day when it comes down to abuse, anyone can always go around it if they really really try in any type of system in place. However, in comparison with other social bookmarking websites I definitely think Netscape has one of the best systems out by far to monitor articles. It has a lot of potentials and it is definitely not a place where you should miss to get your blog exposed. -Swapw
For some of us, we did all the right things that others have told us; having our own unique content, placing ads, and done all the things that others have told us but we still don't see any results from our hard work through the number of visitors or our monetary income that is generated from our web site. What's wrong here?
You would be surprised at how basic these problems can be, but many times it's really easy for you and I to overlook into the nature of our website and how it is being designed. I will be explaining about it through my video today. Design is very important to the life of a website. Take my own website for example. For those of you that has been following my posts since the beginning you would know that I have made a lot of changes throughout the past few months in my own website. From settling in the beginning with just a very standardized template offered by Blogger to something more personally designed today. The contents remain the same, but the results and difference are clearly astounding based on templates alone.
Is the look of your website dull? Is your website a bit overcrowded? Are you placing too many ads or banners in your website? Or are the spacings just a little bit off? As little of an issue as it sounds, it can really portray your personality through your page. Let's face it, if you use a blogger given template, how many additional people will choose the same type of template as yourself? The chances are, probably tons and your content may be a lot better then the next person writing however since the templates are similar a lot of time people would just assume it's similar to each other.
It's always better to design your own template if you have some knowledge in programming to make your own template one of a kind. However, if you don't know any coding there are actually many websites which offer free templates. The ones that I've seen which I would recommend would be from the following links. Obviously you can always customize with different pictures or colors instead as well, enjoy! -Swapw
Many of us blog everyday in hopes that our blog would be recognized or through it to make some money but did you know that there's one area a lot of us overlook which may potentially kill off all of our traffic? Traffic means money and today's topic is an area which I have been treaking around for some time and I do have to say before I continue to write that I was at one point failing to recognize the problem. It is something crucial and as a blogger I wish someone would have told me earlier.
The silent killer lies within the widget itself that we embedd into our blog itself. I do talk extensively in details through my video but it's important to understand the nature of each widgets or code that you add into your blog. Elimination of any pop-up is very key when selecting a widget to install to your blog and be sure to always check your privacy report to see what type of programs each widgets bring to your site. Failing to eliminate these unwanted pop-ups, it will kill your traffic not only from some of your local visitors but in a globally scaled standpoint. To make money smart, it's not running after the traffic necessarily but how to retain your target audiences!
-Swapw "Making money smart"
Now, due to a risen popularity of link exchanges and Technorati favorite exchanges I thought I provide an offer out to those that are interested in these exchanges. Leave me a comment and I love to exchange if your blog is in some relations to the topics that I cover.
Recently, I have been hearing a lot of discussions on Google Page Rank and due to its importance I have decided to provide you with an general overview about what it is through the video. As I have went through the video, it is definitely very important to establish your Google Page Rank in the long run if you wish to be seen by the general public. To obtain visibility should be a top priority if you are to go against major companies throughout the web who completes for the same slot.
To find out how your web site is in performance, I would recommend utilizng Iwebtool underhttp://www.Iwebtool.com. In comparison with other similar sites which provide web site performance tools such as Blogfux and many more, Iwebtool has in my opinion one of the most updated and comprehensive tools which shows details about your site rather just the results. Their data base are generally very user friendly and is easy to use.
Unfortunately under the update this time throughGoogle, this web page did not do so well perhaps due to the amount of exposure and recognition is not considered optimal, I do however see the site's growth in a steady pace due to the current optimzation that I've done to the site so far. For those of you who want to achieve a higher page rank, remember the web site only becomes recognized through the effort you put in it and only time will tell the results. The next page rank is said to be four months from now, so keep it up. Good luck!
I am a 28 years old entrepreneur on the internet and a partner of an international consulting company. I currently resides in CA, US and I enjoy bloggging in my spare time about money making online. As I continue to learn continuously, I try my very best to share with my readers everything that I have learned.
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