Google is the most popular search engine. Thousands of searches are made each day on Google alone. Google is also a fast search engine, contains billions of pages and delivers good results. It’s true that there are fluctuations in Google but that’s the nature of search engines. It can be normal fluctuations or an algorithm change which can alter the search engine result pages.

You can enjoy top search engine rankings for quite a long time with Google but it can happen that you might suffer from a drop in rankings which can be temporary usually because of a glitch or these can also be permanent if you’re banned mostly attributed to black hat seo techniques. I’ve seen all these things on Google and the best thing to do is not to panic right away. Your rankings can come back with time. I’ve even experienced rankings recovery after 2-3 months without changing anything.

What you should do is always find other ways of driving traffic to your websites like article writing and submission, doing valuable reciprocal link exchanges with related and relevant sites as these alone can bring traffic. Imagine you get a valuable reciprocal link on a related site which brings you five targeted visitors per day, now say you have 10 such links, you already receive 50 targeted visitors a day and 1500 monthly targeted visitors.

If you focus on some article promotion initially, you can at least give your site some value as far as traffic is concerned. As a result, you have better chances in getting targeted reciprocal links. You have to offer something similar in return to your link partners. Some people are saying reciprocal links have no value at all and they are removing them from their pages but targeted and reciprocal links with similar sites are still of great value. The Internet is an interconnection of websites and you have websites linking to each other to form the web. You can find a valuable website from another website. You click here and you are there and so on. Each link you have has the potential to give you traffic. Of course a homepage reciprocal link is definitely better and a reciprocal link in content articles is also great. These are some sort of partnerships you can potentially make with other webmasters. Just need to be creative.

If we consider the traffic generation ways above like article promotion and reciprocal link exchanges, you have to realise that you can get Google traffic by using these methods. With article promotion, if your article ranks high in another website, and people find your article, they can potentially click on your link in your author bio and gives you visitors. With reciprocal links, if a user finds your partner’s website and happens to see your link say on the homepage or on a content page or even a link directory, you’ve got a visitor.

In my hosting stats, I saw visitors coming directly from my articles on other sites and visitors coming from my partners’ websites mostly from homepages. You can still get Google traffic although not direct searches to your site but still it’s good traffic. We can call that indirect Google traffic. When going after indirect Google traffic, you are at the same time working on your offpage search engine optimization meaning securing inbound links. With an article, you can get an inbound link with anchor text and with a homepage reciprocal link partnership or content article reciprocal link partnership, same thing. Not only will these techniques get you indirect Google traffic but they can give you some boost in your search engine rankings for your keyword phrases or at least gives you a solid foundation in link popularity. Once you get some links to your site, you have high chances to get your website indexed in the first place which is the initial step in search engine marketing. If you’re not indexed, you can’t rank for anything.

The popular search engine Google indexes over 8 billion websites. Is one of them yours, or is your website just floating around in cyberspace and you’re hoping your customers will just find you? Is your website a benefit to your organization or company? Is it just an expensive showpiece or is it of true value?

These are some of the many questions that can be asked when launching a new website. With so many different websites being published (some amazing, awful and otherwise), it would be safe to assume that most current business plans underway include the utilization of a website, and that most active companies are utilizing the Internet to some degree. If you are interested in publishing a website, or already have, here are some key elements that may help towards its success:

1. Domain Registration: Be sure to register your domain name (www.yourdomain.com) yourself or have it done within your organization, as opposed to letting a third party register your name. Without control of your domain name registration, you can expect to run into some unnecessary delays if the third party becomes unavailable, which is surprisingly common. You also run the risk of having the registration setup incorrectly or even losing the domain. Purchasing a domain is very easy and available at less than $10 a year, so it is a very inexpensive yet potentially valuable asset.

2. Hosting: After domain registration is complete, you will be in control of where to host your website. Your website will be hosted on an Internet server, a computer that will house your website files and process any functionality such as shopping carts, email, databases, etc. Shop around for hosting options, they vary from inexpensive do-it-yourself options, to managed hosting plans, to exorbitantly expensive plans that are unnecessary. What you need to accomplish with your website will determine what your hosting needs are. I have seen small, compact sites be very effective, so beware of purchasing 500MB of hosting when you may only need 10MB.

3. Design and Development: When it comes to website design, less can often be more. Your website should load quickly and yet be visually stimulating. Try to maintain a consistency of look with any pre-existing marketing material you have in place. Avoid bombarding your visitors with tons of miscellaneous information and links, keep your content precise and to the point, and be sure all of your links work properly and that information is presented in an organized manner. Further development can allow you to take online orders, process payments, store customer info in a database, etc. The type of development you need will depend on what your company wants to accomplish with the website. The bottom line is that even a simple website should be beneficial to your organization when well designed.

4. Caution: Keep in mind that anyone, anywhere in the world, can access your website, so take caution with what you make public. The Internet offers wonders of information exchange, but sadly that can sometimes work against us, depending on who accesses the information and for what reasons. One very bizarre and extremely sad case was the young pregnant mother that was murdered and her baby stolen, after her killer saw a picture of the pregnant woman on the Internet (selling dogs) and then setup a meeting pretending to have an interest in a dog. Focus on publishing informative content related to your products and services only, and keep personal or sensitive information private as much as possible.

5. Marketing: Once your website is designed and hosted you will be ready for visitors, but how are you going to get them to visit your site? Make sure a major search engine indexes your website. If the website is coded correctly, this will be automatic but may take a few weeks. Be sure your website address appears on all of your marketing material, and direct customers to your website for specific reasons, ie. coupons, specials, additional info, etc. Also, explore the many online marketing opportunities as well as traditional print ads.

6. Maintenance: Be sure to pay all domain registration and hosting fees on time. If you would like to be able to update and edit your website yourself, some professional website designers may offer this service. You may be surprised how easily it can be done and being able to do self-maintenance allows you to get the most out of your website.

Good luck and have fun publishing!

As an online business owner, do you find yourself facing some major challenges with getting more work done, in less time, and as a result your business suffers?

If you’re one of the thousands of people that suffer from running a one man operation and are desperately seeking serious help with the necessary key areas of your online successfully, now you will have the answers, but first…

Which of these every day Business tasks take up most of your time?

Answering Email
Web Design
Script Installations
Recruiting Affiliates
Recruiting Link Partners
Search Engine Optimization
Article Submissions
Testing Marketing Campaigns
Keyword Research
Content Research
Developing AdSense Websites

Sound familiar?

How’s that 1 man operation working for ya?

Are you your own webmaster, business manager, vp of operations, programming team, customer support rep, secretary, etc. ?

If so, now is the perfect time for you to take charge of your life, and take control of your online business activities before they take control of YOU once and for all.

Many online business owner’s suffer with these ongoing headaches, believing there’s no other alternative. It’s happened to the best of us, and it can happen to you too, if it hasn’t happened already…

Before you decide to hire outside help, be sure that you have a clear vision of the task at hand that you want the company, or freelancer to perform for you.

Freelancers vs. Outsourcing Firms

A Freelancer is often the first choice, but after dealing with my fair share of Freelancers, some are very difficult to deal with, worse yet, they often have more then 1 project on the go, and can take weeks or months before your project is completed. ( Some charge a lot higher then the original bid, when it’s all said and done. )

A Freelancer is limited to their individual resources, meaning there’s only so much 1 person can do, plus they often excel at just 1 skill. If you have multiple projects, and multiple tasks
at hand, a Freelancer will not be able to keep up with your ever growing business demands.

When to use Freelancers?

If you have a single project, which doesn’t take a lot of time, and can quickly be accomplished by a person with specialized skills, such as a programmer or graphics designer, or if you need a script installed on your server, and they can do it quickly for you.

Where to find Freelancers?

Check out scriptlance.com, eLance.com, and other freelance related sites, when you’re tired of searching for the right individual, then you may be ready for an Outsourcing Firm.

When to use an Outsourcing Firm?

When an Outsourcing Firm is well established and setup, it will often be able to keep up with your ongoing demands, such as:

Handling your customer service, designing your graphics, and websites, recruiting affiliates along with link partners, Installing scripts for you, they’ll also be able to implement
traffic strategies, and complete any tasks that are demanded to run your business effectively. ( If of course they’re properly set up )

Rather then having 1 freelancer do several jobs for you, an Outsourcing Firm will often have teams in place, specifically trained to handle multiple tasks.

How do you benefit?

You can now have multiple projects, and tasks completed at the SAME time, rather than waiting for each job to be completed before moving on to the next.

Before choosing either a Freelancer or an Outsourcing Firm, be sure to evaluate your company’s goals, and determine which option would be best suited for your tasks at hand.

Be sure to check out their portfolios, ask to see client testimonials, and determine their reputation, and their ability to deliver results in a timely manner. Remember, Time is Money, and you can’t afford to lose either one!

As a business owner, you want to work with people that will maximize your results, require minimum supervision, and give you the peace of mind of knowing that your projects will be completed on time, every time.

When you Outsource successfully, you will have more time to focus on growing your business, rather then working in it.

Outsourcing Dot Com is a firm focused on helping online business owners eliminate the painstaking tasks that are taking up their precious time. It was built for online business
owners, by a successful online business owner.

You can get a sneak peak at what current Outsourcing Dot Com clients are saying about their projects, and how they’re now enjoying more FREE time to spend with their family and friends…

Some are now focused on the key areas that will maximize their profits this year. Read their stories below, and find out how you too can get more work done, in LESS time, because you too deserve to have more time to enjoy with family and friends.

http://www.OutsourcingDotCom.com/Outsourcing/

There are many ways to make money from “mini sites”. Mini Site for a general definition usually means a very small site with only a few pages (3 to 10).However today I am solely concentrating on selling a “single product”. This can be an ebook, piece of software, a service or even simply “list building”.

**The Most Important Factor!

The main thrust of any highly profitable mini site is in the planning.

Once this has been achieved “you must see through to the end your action and marketing plan/system.”

I have seen too many times people build sites and products only to quit without going the whole course.

I have a current client with an excellent ebook of which the topic has huge demand and his book is only one of two on the market.

Like he stated; “I have put six months, time, effort and money into this book, I am not going to quit now”.

With a little testing, editing and site marketing, we will have his book selling 500 to 1000% more copies within a month or so.

So don’t get to the 80% point of you work and then quit.

Do a bit more testing, build a better linking campaign, write that pop-up course, launch that press release, do more research, get your sales copy professionally written, have your ebook edited by an expert, get help if you need to.

Plan to Succeed and Succeed by Finishing!

**Your Product – Is There Demand?

Simple & quick ways to ascertain if demand for your product or service is present before taking steps to create it.

1. Use Nichebot (http://www.nichebot.com/) & Word Tracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) to research your keywords and get an idea of competition.

2. After choosing your keyword/s, do a search on Google and see how many “adwords” (right hand side of the screen) advertisements appear.

Click on these ads to see “exactly what” they are selling. Are they selling a product the same or similar to yours and at what price? Set up an excel file and check the same keywords over a two week period, who’s advert stays and who’s drops off?

It is best to change your Google ‘preferences’ to show 100 search findings to examine the ads more easily.

3. Set up your own free Adwords account (https://adwords.google.com/select/) and see what amounts are being bid for your given keyword.

The next few tasks also help with the above however it will help you deicide whether there is an exact need for your own product.

1. Do a search for your keywords on Overture (http://www.content.overture.com/d/). Under the top search result click on “sponsored linking” and then click the “view bids tool”.

This will give you the prices of all bids. In general a higher price means that there is much competition and demand for that keyword and product.

Click on a few these links to see exactly what is being sold.

2. Start asking questions on forums associated with your business and product. Does anyone own similar products, what was good about the product or bad, improvements that could be made and so on?

3. Get a survey done.

4. Write a short email course, set-up a website and get traffic to the site using Adwords. At the end of the course get subscribers to fill out a survey stating whether they would find your new product useful and if they would purchase it.

**Product – Service Production

This is part is straight forward really. Being that it’s your own product, you should already know how to produce it or least some idea.

I will say that if you are writing an ebook, by far the easiest method is to produce it in Microsoft “word” or similar and then convert it into “Pdf” using Adobe Acrobat 7.

**Setting Up

Again, setting up your website, domain name, etc can be done quite easily and inexpensively.

**Testing

You must split test! This simply means to test different parts of your sales copy, headings, pictures, price that is on your sales page to achieve the highest sales percentages (website hits to sales).

At this stage though you have a choice!

You can split test your product by driving clients to your site using “paid methods” such as Adwords (https://adwords.google.com/select/).

Or

You can start building traffic to your site and then test with free traffic.

Or

The best option, do both at the same time!

Let me make this very clear. Testing can and does make & break many businesses!

Fail to test and your business can under or you could be loosing $10,000’s lost revenue every year. Do not fail to test.

**Marketing Your Mini Site

On of the best ways to market your own product is with an affiliate program. You can have hundreds if not thousands of people advertising your product or service all over the net for free.

Here are several top affiliate services currently on the market:

http://www.clickbank.com
http://www.cj.com (Commission Junction)

http://paydotcom.com

At this stage we get into the nuts and bolts of web traffic and marketing however as much of this is similar for some sites I will cover web traffic methods in detail in the following section.

**Planning & Your Budget

After completing your research you should plan you whole business campaign and prepare and research a budget.

What will you do yourself and what will you outsource? Items to think about are:

Web Design
Sales Copy
Affiliate Setup
Accepting Payments
Download Area (If an online product)
Delivery
Marketing & Web Traffic

If you are a small business much of this can be handled by a staff member to set up or organize. If a solopreneur the same can be done.

**Sales copy – a word of warning!

If you have no sales copy experience, you will improve with time spent online.

Even so, although I have many years of experience I still outsource my major copy writing needs. Copy writing is a highly acquired skill and while good copy will make you a lot of money, bad copy will…….

So bottom line. If you have no skill in copy writing, outsource it.

**That’s it! Start you marketing campaign and watch the profits flood in!

Back in the good old days it wasn’t nearly so tough to get decent rankings fast. Wasn’t nearly so complicated either. You put up some pages, got some links and built from there. Enjoying improving rankings on your way to the top. But that was then and this is now. Now there might be times where you WOULD be better off with two sites, (same niche) than just one.

And if I might chance to read you mind you’re thinking, “What? Is this guy crazy? I can’t keep one site going and growing much less two.”

I’m with you. But read on to discover when you might want to break out the second site.

===> Aggressive Article Marketing
Say you’re engaged in an aggressive article marketing campaign. Or you’re chasing as many reciprocal links as you can. Both legit ways to drive potential visitors or customers or subscribers to your site.

Yet how’s that going to mesh with the go slow approach to links Google now favors? Think your zeal might throw be like throwing sugar in the gas tank? And ace you out of the running for top rankings in Google? Maybe.

So if you want to use an article submission service that blasts your article far and wide you might want to rethink that. Or at least develop a second site for the links in your resource box to point to. Since if you’ve got a site you’re grooming for Google, too many links of any kind too fast raises a red flag.

===> Link Triangulation
It’s helpful to have two sites to do link triangulation. Which is a great way to get one way links.

Let’s assume you feel one way links are better. To get those two sites are a must. Simply offer to link to your link partner’s site from Site A while they link to your Site B.

Next time offer to link to the other web site from Site B while they link to your Site A.

This approach lets you build one way links to two sites at once, albeit at half speed. Which is a good thing since you’re building links slowly. Or the currently approved approach for Google.

===> Adsense or Affiliate Site?
Some seemingly have strong feelings about whether or not Adsense cannibalizes affiliate sales.

Of course the ONLY way to know for sure is to test it. Simply take an established site and run Adsense ads alone for one month. Then drop those ads and feature affiliate products only for the next 30 days. Which produces the most cash flow?

If you find Adsense does cannibalize this may be another situation ripe for the two site solution. Obviously you’ll want to edit the content so it’s close to unique for each site. Or you might emphasize product reviews on the affiliate site. While offering informative yet more topical articles on the site featuring Adsense.

===> Yahoo/MSN vs Google Focus?
More and more there is precious little overlap in the respective top rankings of Yahoo, MSN and Google. What works great for grabbing top MSN rankings might well get you in hot water over at Google. While Yahoo at times yearns to be more the anti Google than anything else.

That said, both Yahoo and MSN are more forgiving of, uh, enthusiastic optimization techniques. For instance you can get away with a higher keyword density with them than you would ever dare try with Google anymore.

But as in real life it’s hard to please two bosses. So the smart thing might be to set up two sites. To make it easy exclude the googlebot from the site designed with Yahoo/MSN in mind using your robots.txt file. And then reverse roles by excluding Yahoo/MSN from the site you’re using to catch Google’s eye.

So there you have it. Four instances when two sites may be better than one for your home based internet marketing business.