Blogging… A Website Without All The Fuss!
February 26, 2007 by Trish Jones
Filed under Website Promotion
Want a website fast? Then you should consider a blog…
How many of you have been working on your website for more than say four weeks? And how many of you have come across the terms blog or blogging but are either unsure about how to do one, or have passed it off as a teenage pastime?
Well let me first of all say, that most people new to marketing on the Internet take months and even years to get their websites online because unless you’re writing a one page sales letter, there seems to be no standard way of how to structure a website or even how to write the content.
In essence, the effectiveness of your website is going to depend a lot on who you copied or learnt from and the sad reality is that whilst there are billions of web pages in cyberspace…
95% of all websites are still considered innefective!
And I’m sorry to tell you, that your web designer is probably of little help because most designers focus on the look and feel of a website rather than it’s marketing capability.
But the great thing about the web is that technology has enabled even the most technologically challenged the ability to market effectively online, without the need of a graphic designer and without having to learn how to use Microsoft’s FrontPage or Dreamweaver. How?
Welcome the Blog!
A blog is the fastest and most economical way of getting your website up online and it’s cheap and easy to maintain.
I my view, if you are an author, information marketer or independent professional, your first website ought to be a blog. Why?
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You’ll be up and running in hours rather than weeks or months
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A blog is a great way of sharing your knowledge and expertise
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You can quickly establish yourself as an authority in your field
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The search engines love blogs because the content changes continuously, which have their own search engines so you’re likely to get higher rankings that you’d be able to achieve with a static website
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If you’re an author, you can sell your book by blogging on excertps from your book
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A blog gives you a platform for your own voice so people can get to know like and trust you sooner, giving you the opportunity of creating more sales
These are just a few of the many benefits to blogging and I encourage you to start blogging today, even if you don’t have a website. How? Just find other blogs of interest to you and start commenting on their blogs. This in itself will give you more understanding once you build your own blog.
Best of success,
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Domain Name Registration
February 24, 2007 by Trish Jones
Filed under Website Promotion
Where to get your domain names and what domain name should you register?
My first domain name registrations cost me almost $50 for two years and I know that some of the well established Internet marketers online will tell you that they paid considerably more!
But today, you can purchase domain names for as little as $8 from Go Daddy and there are other domain name registration services such as Enom.com that will also give you little extras such as a free web site creator and web to phone text messaging so you can have friends and customers send you text messages to your mobile device, directly from your web site (such as http://mobile.example.com). Cool eh!
As well as needing to know where to purchase domain names at a reasonable costs, people always want to know that they have chosen the best domain name, particularly if this is going to be for a business since it’s as important as giving your new High Street shop a name.
But whilst there are no hard and fast rules with registering a domain name, there are a few things you should take into consideration…
Register YourName.Com And Make It A Blog
If you don’t register YourName.com, someone else will and then charge you big bucks to buy it from them. You may not think that having your own name as a domain name is important now, but a) $4 per year is hardly worth the risk of wanting it later and finding it’s taken and b) you can install a blog on that domain to showcase your other websites and products. This is what I decided to do with www.trishjones.com.
The other consideration when choosing a domain name is to esure the name accurately reflects what you sell. Here are some examples:
www.homemadesoaps.com
www.thepastorscoach.com
www.recipesfortots.com
Again, there are no hard and fast rules, but people are much more likely to click on a link to your domain name, if it reflects what you are looking for. And remember, you’re not trying to be all things to all people with your website or blog, so you are only targeting those who are interested in what you have to sell.
Until next time,
The WordPress Theme That Takes The Work Out of Blogging
February 16, 2007 by Trish Jones
Filed under Website Promotion
Not all WordPress blog themes are created equal… You have to use this one to believe it.
I’m also aware from a survey carried out by Mike Filsaime that over 50% of people who market online are new to the Internet and blogging, so my mission has been to find the easiest solution for those getting started on the Internet.
And then… a few weeks ago I hit the jackpot!! Okay, not quite, but I didn’t realize that I had the solution in my hand or should I say driving my blog, that would help the ordinary person market online without the headache of static websites, SEO, designers and webmasters.
WELCOME SEMIOLOGIC PRO!
What on earth is this!! Well, it’s a WordPress blog theme, which I’ve been using for over a year now, and is recommended by Blog Evangelist Sherman Hu as well as recommended on the highly acclaimed subscription only website, StomperNet.
Although I’d been using the software a year, there were a few features that I wasn’t aware of and stumbled on them accidentally… thankfully!
I knew for example that the software enabled you to create a static front page which gives the blog its own front page, just like you see on static websites, so on entering the blog, visitors would perceive the blog to be an ordinary website. What I didn’t realize however, was that the theme had a sales letter template built into the software!
Now, why am I so excited about this…?
Now you can create a sales letter and have it as one of your blog pages. If you wish, to make it easy to marketing your product or service, just purchase another domain name and have it redirect to that page one your blog. So, instead of having www.marketingteamx.com/dvd-scratch-repair-machine - obvioulsy a made up name, but can you imagine having to give someone that domain name? So you’d purchase the domain name www.dvdscratchrepairmachine.com. and which you’ll use to market your product or service and have it redirect to www.marketingteamx.com/dvd-scratch-repair-machine.
Well, so what Trish, people have been doing that with websites for years so what’s different?
What’s different is that blogs have their own search engines, which means they get indexed by the search engine spiders faster than a static website (sometimes in days) and the Cascading Style Sheet canvass in Semiologic Pro has already been optimized for the search engines so all you do is write a blog page, select the sales letter template and your sales letter will get indexed in just the same way your other posts and pages within your blog will be indexed.
No need to learn Microsoft Front Page or Dreamweaver
And, you have the benefit of an instant search engine optimized salesletter!
See what I mean here by going to Denis de Bernardy’s salesletter for Semiologic Pro software… Ensure you take a look at the address bar in Internet Explorer or Firefox and notice the extension… i.e. www.semiologic.com/sem-theme-pro - indicating that this web page is an extension of the www.semiologic.com website.
So, you can either download a free WordPress theme, pay $49 for a good one, or you can take the search engine optimization work out of marketing your blog and use what the Pro’s use.
I asked Denis de Bernardy to comment on his Semiologic Pro Theme a few days ago and this is what he considers to be the key aspects of the software…
a) Things work. It may come as a surprise to many bloggers, but most open source software does _not_ work well.
b) It’s relatively straightforward to set up and customize a site. The bulk of the front end is customizable without editing php files.
c) It addresses the most important SEO aspects out of the box without any action from the user, including an optimized canvas, avoiding duplicate content, and structuring the site in such a way that the most important piece of information is put forward in keyword-rich page aggregates.
d) It’s straightforward to insert site-wide ad units using Ad Spaces. And you can investigate all sorts of monitization strategies via split tests using ad distributions.
e) Once you’ve configured a site the way you want it, you can clone it in one click.
Go and check it out for yourself, try it on a few of your blogs that haven’t been performing quite so well and notice the difference in terms of traffic and ranking.
Happy Blogging,
New Look Blog And New Blog Focus
February 13, 2007 by Trish Jones
Filed under Website Promotion
Are blogs really wanted by independent professionals?
For many months now, I have been helping independent professionals get their business online and whilst they’re keen to learn, in almost every case, we’ve ended up with a blog. Why?
Blogs are quick and easy to set up, they require relatively little ‘techie’ knowledge compared to putting up and marketing a static website, you don’t need a webmaster or designer and, you can change the look and feel in just a few minutes… as I did this evening!
So whilst I’ve enjoyed putting up webpages, I’m finding that less and less of my clients want a static website. They want a blog because of it’s low cost and easy to maintain attributes so they can focus on marketing their business and not having to learn how to keep their websites updated and master the art of search engine optimization - SEO - techniques to get traffic to their website or, having to rely on Google Adwords.
So, in the spirit of giving people what people want, the focus of my blog will be changing… My main focus will be on setting up your blogs, for profit, as well as all of the other techniques that go with marketing and monetizing your blog.
Next time I’m going to tell you about what I believe to be the best blogging software or theme that you can use if you want your blogs indexed fast, you want flexibility with your blog and you want to be able to focus even less on SEO to bring traffic to your blog.
Stay tuned,
4 Smart Ways To Market Your Business Online
February 11, 2007 by Trish Jones
Filed under Teleseminars
Market your online business the easy way!
And believe it or not, these are relatively easy ways that you can use to build your relationships online too. In fact, I would go as far as saying that it’s never been easier to build business relationships online as it is today.
So I want to give you 4 smart ways that you can build your business online whilst building your brand, your credibility, your list as well as business relationships:
Blogging
A blog not only gives you the platform to share information as well as your expertise, it helps establish a relationship with your prospects who will usually only do business with those they know, like and trust.
But a major plus about blogging is that they have their own search engines, making it easier for you to get your name out in cyberspace as well as making it easier for people to find you.
Teleseminars
Teleseminars are one of the fastest and most economical ways to market your services whilst making your clients and prospective clients feel as though they know you personally. By hosting free or fee based teleseminars, you add personality to your business and you get to personally interact with your visitors so you can close more sales.
And the icing on the cake with teleseminars is that they are inexpensive to run and won’t cost you any extra in advertising.
Article Marketing
Using articles to market your business could give you expert status over night because your articles are submitted to directories who have the ability to distribute them to thousands of readers in less time than you could using search engine optimization techniques.
As Jason Potash of Article Announcer put it…
article marketing really is for the "Search Engine ‘Dummies’…’Traffic Challenged’ Business Owners… And Anyone Else Who Wants More Traffic, NOW!"
And you’ll boost your Search Engine Rankings and link popularity and… it’s totally ethical so it won’t get your website blacklisted by the search engines!
Web PR
I admit that this isn’t a stragegy I’ve personally used, but I know of those who have used it with great success.
Web PR requires zero technical skills and is a proven method to dominate the News Search Engines so you get more traffic.
The two major news search engines are:
- Yahoo! News: http://www.news.yahoo.com
- Google News http://www.news.google.com
If you want more information on Web PR, go to PRTraffic.com
All of the above marketing strategies are low cost and yet knock the socks of many other forms of marketing online! You don’t have to purchase anything , but I want you to get more information about the benefits of using these 4 marketing stragegies.
To your online success,
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