Writing articles for your site and for the use of others, is a simple proven way low cost way to get more traffic.

Articles can be used for all subjects and just like newspapers and magazines, is a recognised way of sharing information.

Articles a low cost way of promotion but they do take time which can pay you back year after year for your efforts.

Most people tend to think that they can’t write well. It’s nothing more than sharing helpful information that you have learned. For example the idea of this article is to help format you thoughts and then the best way to format it best for users. So lets get started.

1. Firstly you need to choose who is your target market. Who is your article for and why would they find it helpful?

Example: "Home business websites who are looking for low cost traffic"

2. Choose the purpose of you article. Why are you writing it? How will you use it? This will help guide the content of it.

Example: "Provide an article for distribution, which other webmasters/ezine owners can use creating links back to my site, and subscribers to my ezine"

Always keep the purpose of the article in mind, which will help you keep on track with your content.

3. Article Subject -What are you going to write about? What subject? Use other articles you have seen or experiences you have had for ideas.

Example: Using articles for low cost online promotion

From the subject you have chosen you need to create a headline of sorts- some thing that makes people want to read it. Create curiosity and use emotion.

Example: How to turn words into free traffic for your site

4. Format Outline -This is when you decide the format of your article, just like you were taught at school.

a. Introduction - An outline of what you are going to discuss and why.

b. Main body - Points you are going to cover including any references to helpful sites or site involved in what you learnt

c. Conclusion - What resulted and how it worked or it didn’t. What could you do differently next time.

d. Resource box - Normally a link to your site, information about your site, about you. Here is good article on resource boxes:

http://digitalawol.com/box

5. Checking - At this stage you should have the outline of an article. You need to get someone else to read it over, spell checking it, making sure the information flows well.

I also recommend leaving it overnight before using it. It gives you a chance to re think it.

6. Online formatting - If you intend to make your article available to ezine owners, then you need to make sure it is formatted correctly and easy for them to use. The standard accepted format is 65 Characters wide- in plain text.

Most people us Microsoft word for word processing so you will need to re-format by using a program such as Note Tab light http://www.notetab.com/ (no cost) which will format your article correctly.

One thing you will also need to do is ensure you only have paragraphs of 4-5 lines otherwise it creates a "mental block" for the reader, and becomes too hard to read online.

So now you have a formatted, helpful article ready for your use. The last thing you need to keep in mind is that you need to provide helpful, well-researched information. A full-page ad for your site will not do you any good and will get deleted quickly.

Try to write from your own experiences and it will come across as real and very readable.

My next article will cover getting the information out there and working for you.

You can get the next article by subscribing to our ezine. It will surprize you find out that there are places you should NOT post your article, as they may not help your business.

Need more visitors to your web site and no more BS? Paul Easton is the editor of Power Promotion Plus. Learn how to increase traffic on a budget. Signup now and get your 3 gifts:

1.Free Meta Tag Software -2.Unofficial Pop Up Windows Crash Course -3.Affiliate Marketing Plan Builder - A step by step guide to a successful affiliate marketing program.

http://www.CreateToolbar.com/

(This article is available for reprint simply by adding the above Bio and no changes are made to the article or its content)

The opportunities for getting free advertising for your product or services are limited only by your own imagination and energies. There are so many proven ways of promoting your own objectives without cost that it literally boggles the mind just to think of listing them. One way is to write an article relative to your particular expertise and submit it to all the publications and media dealing in the dissemination of related information. In other words, become your own publicity and sales promotions writer. Get the word out; establish yourself as an expert in your field, and "tag-along" everything you write with a quick note listing your address for a catalog, dealership opportunity, or more information.

Another really good way is by becoming a guest on as many of the radio and television talk shows or interview type programs as possible. Actually, this is much easier to bring about than most people realize. Write a letter to the producer of these programs, then follow up with an in-person visit or telephone call. Your initial contact should emphasize that your product or service would be of interest to the listeners or viewers of the program - perhaps even saving them time or money.

Other ways of getting free or very inexpensive exposure include the posting of advertising circulars on all the free bulletin boards in your area, especially the coin-operated laundries, grocery stores, and beauty and barber shops. Don’t discount the idea of handing out circulars to all the shoppers in busy shopping centers and malls, especially on weekends. You can also enlist the aid of the middle school students in your area to hand out circulars door-to-door.

Some of the more routine methods include having a promotional ad relative to your product or service printed on the front or back of your envelopes at the time you have them printed with your return address.

Be sure to check all the publications that carry the kind of advertising you need. Many mail order publications just getting started offer unusually low rates to first-time advertisers; a free-of-charge insertion of your ad when you pay for an order to run three issues or more; or special seasonal ad space at greatly reduced rates. And there are a number of publications that will give you Per Inquiry (PI) space - an arrangement where all orders come in to the publication, they take a commission from each order, and then forward the orders on to you for fulfillment.

Many publications will give you a contract for "stand-by" space. In this arrangement you send them your ad, and they hold it until they have unsold space, and then at a price that’s always one third or less than the regular price for the space you need, insert your ad. Along these lines, be sure to check in with the suburban and neighborhood newspapers.

If you send out or publish any kind of catalog or ad sheet, get in touch with all the other publishers and inquire about the possibilities of exchange advertising. They run your ad in their publication in exchange for your running an ad for them of comparable size in yours.

Finally, there’s nothing in the world that beats the low cost and tremendous exposure you get when you advertise a free offer. Simply run an ad offering a free report of interest to most people - a simple one-page report with a "tag-line" inviting the readers to send money for more information, with a full page advertisement for your book or other product on the backside. Ask for a self-addressed stamped envelope, and depending on the appeal of your report and the circulation of the publication in which your ad appears, you could easily be inundated with responses!

The trick here, of course, is to convert all of these responses, or a large percentage of them, into sales. This is done via the "tag-line," which issues an invitation to the reader to send for more information, and the full page ad on the back of the report, and the other offers you include with the complete package you send back to them. As mentioned at the beginning of this report, it’s just a matter of unleashing your imagination. Do that, and you have a powerful force working for you that can help you reach your goals.

Want to learn how to start and grow your very own Home Business? If so, visit our internet home based business resource center to learn from the best tried and tested interet business startup ideas at http://www.internet-home-based-business-ideas.com

The internet has the capacity, sometimes, to divorce not just our minds from our bodies and siphon us into cyberspace but also our common sense.

When it comes to business models the internet seems to have managed to make us forget everything we knew in the Real World (RL for the acronym lovers) and slow down the length of time it takes us to re-learn it.

How else can we explain the fact that the number one selling tool in the universe is so underused on the internet that hardly anyone remembers to implement it. All right, I’ve played games long enough, time to get real and tackle exactly what I’m talking about.

In the real world before you change your mobile phone, splash out for that flat-screen plasma TV or set out to test-drive the latest muscle-car at your local dealer you first discuss it with your friends. That’s because you’re the product of an evolutionary process that has conditioned us, as a species, to pool our resources in order to reach a decision that is far more informed than anything we could have managed on our own.

More brains than one

Left alone, on an island, without even a Man Friday to talk to our store of knowledge and our ability to make informed judgements would soon deteriorate to the point where the quality of our decisions would jeopardise our chances of survival.

The net is no different. We see a product that’s hot, a web page we like or a news item that’s topical and our immediate reaction is to tell a friend (or several). With the internet and email our telling a friend becomes both immediate and personalised. Except that when we’re in full flow, buried in reading the text on a page, checking out the stats on a sports car or weighing up the merits of a particular product we’re loathe to leave the page in order to load up our email programme and spend time firing-off a message or two.

Savvy website designers who understand this have responded with the ‘Tell A Friend’ facility, a nifty applet that, at a click, allows you to tell your friend or friends what you’ve found on the net. That way you and I, as sophisticated consumers, carry on with our online activity and still engage in the critical knowledge-sharing interaction that’s a characteristic of our species.

This is a classic win-win scenario. We do our bit. Website owners get to benefit by recommendations and fresh traffic and our friends find out about websites they probably wouldn’t have come across as quickly (if at all).

In website design parlance a ‘Tell A Friend’ facility is ‘empowerment’. It’s allowing the surfer to increase their interaction with the website and maximise their return from its use.

Not as easy as it looks

Of course, had all this common-sense behaviour really been as common as that I would not have written this article and, in all probability, you would not be reading it. I have no idea why website owners do not ask for it to be implemented more frequently, but I do know that when they do they don’t always get it right.

Remember the reason we didn’t use our email client to send a message to our friends in the first place is because by the time we find what we want on the net and launch ourselves into the web pages we’re in too deep to readily want to interrupt what we’re doing and send a message to anyone.

There are two types of ‘Tell A Friend’ facility you can use. The first takes you to another page where you can type in your friend’s email address, your own and (usually) a brief message. The second type allows you to do all this, prompts you for a message right from the page you’re surfing.

It is the clever use of the second type implemented by web design experts, PQL (http://www.pqlwebsolutions.co.uk/), that proved its mettle when it allowed the pages it appeared on at Cool Publications, an internet publisher website, to increase their traffic load by over 300%.

When analysing why this happened at the Cool Publications monthly traffic stats meeting it became apparent that while in the past we’d relied on valuable word-of-mouth publicity to spread through the digital equivalent of more traditional means (i. e. fire-up your email and send off a message much as you would have picked up the phone when you found a spare moment and talked to your friends about what you’d found), in this case we’d actually ‘prompted’ the surfer to tell their friends and, what’s more, made it possible for this to happen without ever leaving the page.

“Breaking the flow of concentration of surfers is never a desirable thing to do and neither should you take them off your website in order to have them send a message to a friend. The same one-click ease of use that got them there can conspire to take them somewhere else,” says Lead Designer, Paul Beardsell at PQL. “Taking advantage of word-of-mouth publicity is essential to your business but it should never happen at the expense of a sale.”

So, if you have a page on your website (or a product) which you think it’d set the world alight and surfers would like to share with their friends, go ahead and implement the code to make this possible. As long as you remember that empowerment also means ease of use and additional sales, and all this should work, seamlessly together.

David Amerland is the Projects Editor at Cool Publications, an internet publishing company that has revolutionised web marketing and publicity. Prior to that he reported for The European, worked in PR for a national sports corporation and was the lead reporter for Your Money, Savings and Investments magazine.

Over the past couple of months it has been quite noticeable that the amount of time and effort that is going into website promotion is rapidly rising and therefore so is the associated cost of keeping ahead of the competition.

More and more people are devoting more and more time to website promotion and it is becoming a feature of nearly all website promotion campaigns that they are embracing all known search engine promotion techniques instead of exclusively relying on one or two methods.

What we are seeing at the moment is a landshift change in promotion techniques. Only a year or so ago it was thought enough for a search engine optimisation company to optimise the pages (on page optimisation) and submit the website.

However now that the competition is becoming ever fiercer off page optimisation is becoming a necessary requirement of any respectable website promotion campaign.

Let’s examine these two terms and see what we mean my “on page optimisation” and “off page optimisation”.

On page optimisation is the process of tuning the page for a search engine or more usually trying to make it rank highly on a selection of search engines. It’s no wonder that many search engine optimisation engineers focus on google exclusively as it certainly produces the most traffic of all engines, but will that always be the case? Things can change quickly in internet land.

Page optimisation strategies generally consist of using your keyword or keyword phrases in all of the pages known “hotspots”. The page title, meta keyword, meta description, alt tags, first heading and the body text. Subsequent “tweaks” can include bolding the keyword phrase, using the keyword phrase in a hyperlink and more.

To a point there is only so much that you can do to search engineer a page before it starts to look spammy, repeating the keyword phrase over and over. Of course some “optimisers” still do this but it’s quickly becoming a frowned upon practice as it detracts sharply from a website wanting to produce a professional image, not to mention your chances of being banned from the search engine altogether.

This is where “off page optimisation” takes over.

Both Google and Yahoo use a system of “ranking” websites dependent on several factors - one of which is how relevant the content appears to be to the keyphrase searched for (on page optimisation).

The second important criteria that your pages are judged on is how “popular” those pages are in comparison with your competition. Broken down into it’s basest form it means that the more quality votes (links) that your page has then the more popular it must be and so is promoted higher up the search engine results. In google parlance this feature is known as “pagerank” and pagerank is a vitally important part of your website promotion campaign. If you don’t have any then you are standing naked in front of everybody and that’s not a nice feeling!

Google pagerank is based on a scale of 1-10 where 10 has the most influence. The algorithm is configured on a sliding scale so that you only ever gain pagerank as a percentage of the full amount. As those with the highest pagerank are constantly adding more “votes” for their pages it makes sense that those at the bottom end of the scale are going to have to work ever harder to play “catch up” and that is where the extra cost is being factored in to website promotion campaigns.

However it becomes more complicated.

Not all links are equal.

Blindly rushing off and trying to get as many links as possible is not going to help you much. In fact it’s one of the reasons why people are spending so much time and effort in their link exchange campaigns and finding they are getting nowhere.

Savvy online marketers have established that links from pages with a low pagerank are not as valuable as links from those with a higher pagerank. But also in paradox to this it is possible to get more value from linking to a page with lower pagerank than the higher one!

Confused! No wonder “off page optimisation” is becoming such a sought after area of expertise.

The paradox occurs because built into the pagerank algorithm is a method of transferring the amount of pagerank “boost” a page gets by dividing up the total pagerank of a page by the number of links present. So a high pagerank page with 100 links on it is not going to give as much “voting power” as a low pagerank page with only one or two links on it.

Trying to make sense of this is at the heart of any “off page optimisation” campaign. Sifting through links, setting up reciprocal link campaigns (the site you link to links back to you) getting links from directories and so on is a time consuming task, even when using some of the more advanced tools that take a lot of the manual drudgery out of the job.

Link exchanges are springing up all over the place offering to bring together people willing to exchange links and the humble text link is becoming one of the most valuable pieces of internet property. Costs for placing text links on higher ranked sites are escalating and it’s becoming ever more important to network closely with other sites offering useful services to your visitors.

Throwing up a links page and asking all and sundry to link to it is not going to work – all that’s going to do is give you an administrative headache and make your visitors wonder if they are making the right choice. Choosing quality link partners is a time consuming and therefore expensive business.

What this all means is that the cost of website promotion is constantly going up. And those companies with well networked sites and strategically placed links are in a much better position to help their customers than those who rely solely on pay per click campaigns and other expensive forms of advertising.

A website promotion campaign is still the best value for money form of advertising that there is in my opinion, it’s just that the costs are rising and will continue to rise. But the rewards for those that get it right are greater in comparison.

To sum up, search engine optimisation is becoming a more and more labour intensive exercise. There are more pages to be made search engine friendly and to gain top spots each page has to be tuned for a particular search engine. Gone are the days of “one size fits all”.

In addition there is a large amount of work involved in linking strategies and building the “popularity” of a website so that it has a chance of making it into the top 10 results.

It’s this combination of work required that is forcing up the costs of a search engine optimisation campaign.

Tony Cooper is internet marketing manager for: http://www.keywordmarketing.com Building results driven websites.

Consider for a minute my son’s website for grass mowing, grassattacker.com. Obviously this is a very small target group in our town, but think of the ideas and marketing opportunities that could come from something like this. By creating a website for ‘my client’, I’ve not only provided a way for him to increase revenue, but in this case I’ll be along with him (cutting grass all summer?!), and I’ll have the opportunity to market my skills in a non-intrusive manner to obviously web-savvy people.

Do you have a friend or colleague that has a business and website? A complimentary website could be the answer to your business needs. If you were in the flower selling business, why not hook up with a DJ service in your town? Both of you could then share leads on upcoming weddings. You could point business to them, and them to you. Complimentary businesses could boost your revenues dramatically. And complimentary websites that cross-link also increase your Google placement.

Working with complimentary businesses will help you become a leader in your area. If other businesses are recommending you, you’ve already got an advantage on your competition. In our example, a young groom and bride that hear about your flower company from their DJ service is more likely to visit/call you first, assuming they were happy with the DJ business.

Think about merchants that you conduct regular business with, and if they compliment yours in some way, approach them about ’sharing the wealth’. It wouldn’t hurt to ask!

Will Hanke is owner of Lighthouse Technologies, http://www.techlh.com a web design, programming and hosting company. He is also author of several software applications in use by companies across the US.

When I first began attempting to make money on the internet, I fell into the trap of advertising my website with "get rich quick" promoters and products, thinking I’d get my money back immediately with their allegedly wonderful services. After wasting hundreds of dollars on marketing, I decided to take another route: I tried pay-per-click search engines and other conventional-but-expensive means of generating traffic.

I never really saw any conrete results, but I continued plugging away. I talked to business owners, researched different methods, and spent even more money… until I found a few methods that worked for me and have consistantly worked to give my websites exposure. I wrote this article to give readers like you the opportunity to skip the learning curve and move to where I am now. This article will dispell the biggest misconception about marketing and will also give you information about the most effective method to build your online business.

The most common misconception about Internet marketing is that you have to pay an exorbitant amount of money just to get traffic to your website and a steady stream of customers buying your products. This isn’t true. Pay-per-click search engines have their merits and e-commerce marketing companies can sometimes be effective, but they can also be very expensive, often driving you too far into debt to recover before you see any profits. This is precisely why less than 3% of people who begin Internet businesses actually ever see a return on their investment. In this article, I will explain why this isn’t necessary–and how you can skip this learning phase and begin using inexpensive and free tools to begin putting money in your pocket immediately.

While there are many free and inexpensive methods to effectively market your business and put money into your pocket, I am going to focus on the absolute best, fastest, most profitable, and most recommended method among “gurus” and Internet millionaires: creating your own ezine.

You can begin today by signing up with an autoresponding email address, where you can send opt-in subscribers to be added to your mailing list. I would suggest using http://www.getresponse.com because it can handle the biggest loads. You can open an account for free, but I would suggest eventually upgrading to a PRO membership. This autoresponder is by far the most effective Internet marketing tool and after you see how it works, you will want to reap its full potential.

After you take some time to explore and understand your getresponse account, you can begin writing the first article of your ezine. Take some time to review your site and your products. Make sure your ezine article properly reflects what you’re marketing–and make sure you have at least one link to every product you talk about in the issue. Give some general advice, but use persuasive sales language. Entice your potential customers, but do not stretch the truth too much; you want to gain as many TARGETED subscribers as possible. Remember: these people are opting-in to your mailing list because they WANT TO BUY YOUR PRODUCTS. When you have finished your first article, load it into your getresponse account.

Now you are ready to begin marketing your ezine. The best and fastest method of gaining subscribers in my opinion is starting a campaign at http://www.leadfactory.com. Leadfactory will work with you on a pay-per-subscriber basis to help you create a mailing list of PEOPLE WHO WANT TO BUY YOUR PRODUCTS. If you work with Leadfactory, make absolute certain that the ad for your ezine and product is 100% accurate. Remember: you’re paying for subscribers, so you want ones that want to buy your products. I personally would suggest buying subscribers from Leadfactory to begin with, but if you want to go the completely free route, you can begin by signing up for the free trial version of Push Button Leads at http://www.pushbuttonleads.com. You can use this product for free for two weeks and then decide whether or not the amount of subscribers you get is worth the $20/mo. fee.

You are now ready to begin increasing the your ezine’s exposure. This requires MASSIVE ACTION and a lot of patience. You can begin by creating a boilerplate ad for your ezine that includes information about your products. Make the ad only a paragraph long and use some persuasive sales language. You will then need to submit your ezine to ezine directories and ezine announcement lists. You can begin by going to google and typing in “ezine directories.” Begin submitting your subscription information (whateveryournameis@getresponse.com) along with your ad and any other information the site asks for. Do this to as many ezine directories as you can find. I would suggest submitting to a minimum of 50. This will seriously increase your exposure by putting your ad on all of the top ezine directories on google.

Next, go to Yahoo.com and sign up for an account if you don’t have one already. Use Yahoo to find ezine announcement lists and promotion groups. Yahoo has about 100 of these groups on their website and some of them have a significant amount of subscribers. To sign up for these groups, send a blank email to the group email list or the group admin. You should immediately receive an email back, asking you to subscribe. Subscribe to them - and do this to as many promotional lists and groups as you can find. Once you’re in the group, post your ad along with the address of your ezine whateveryournameis@getresponse.com and the address of your site (if they allow it). This technique can win you between 50-500 subscribers each week. Make sure you use it to your advantage by signing up for as many group as possible.

At this point, you have gone further than most internet business owners ever get. Take some time off, relax, and watch your mailing list fill up with subscribers.

Make sure you continue to send out new ezine issues every week or every other week to let your customers know you’ve got new deals on your website.

Isaiah Hull publishes Work At Home Right Now, a fresh and informative newsletter about making money on the internet and using proven methods to increase your site’s traffic and profitability. If you’re looking for time-saving and money-saving tools, as well as honest business advice, come by and subscribe at http://www.workathomerightnow.net

The number one key to getting business in the real estate
home sales market is to be people’s first contact.  The
National Association of Realtor’s last three surveys between
1999 to 2003 said 66% of buyers stayed with the first real
estate agent they contacted yet only 6% of this number came
from web sites.  This number is rising as people become more
comfortable finding their information on the Internet.
There are three ways to show your uniqueness on the
Internet:  words, pictures, and interactive activities.

What is pulling prospects to visit your web site?  You have
the obvious — strategic alliances with lenders, title reps,
home inspectors, appraisers and attorneys.  Here are ten
ideas that aren’t obvious.

1.  Use balloons besides at the open house.  Print an action
slogan on the balloon along with your URL — web site
address.  An action slogan is very important, otherwise
people will not know what the URL is for.  When attending an
outdoor event, like a fair, carry them, place them on your
children’s arm so you can find them, and hand them out.
Take the balloons to the kids baseball games or other
sports.  If traveling with balloons is difficult, call the
show’s event office and find out if there is going to be
someone there with the equipment for balloon blowing.  When
you get there, give them a few dollars to blow a few up for
you.  You can order all sizes and balloon shapes:
http://www.gopromos.com/store/category.asp?CL=101A1276A1292

2.  On brochures add an action request, such as "Search all
area homes for sale anytime."  Or change "anytime" to
"24/7".  If you don’t have this on your brochures, go to an
office supply store and pick up some colorful Avery labels,
or maybe you have some hanging around the office, and create
them yourself.  Also add your URL to that action request.
Go ahead and use the stickers for a lock box action request,
"If this house doesn’t fit your needs, visit [URL] for a
complete search of other homes in this area".

3.  Home-For-Sale Signage.  Does your for sale front lawn or
directional signs for the open house have your web site
address on them?  If not, add them with along with an action
request for all those not quite ready that are driving by,
or for those that don’t have the time to stop at that
particular time.

4.  Community bulletin boards.  Grocery stores, libraries,
community centers.  Post your business cards at minimum.
Create tear off tabs small flyers that fit within their
requirements with an action request and your URL.

5.  "Honk, if you want to sell your home" can be a bumper
sticker or a clear sign for the side or rear top portion of
the back window.

6.  Glow in the dark banners, stickers and auto stickers.
Home signage like:  Visit [URL] for complete information on
this property.  Make it a glow in the dark for night time
visual effectiveness.

7.  What about the times that you don’t have office duty?
What about setting up a table for 3-4 hours outside the
grocery stores.  Add a nice table cloth, the balloons, and a
large sign, "Ask me anything about buying a home."  Or, "Ask
us anything about selling a home."  Switch approaches every
few hours to see which one fits best.  I don’t suggest place
both out there unless there are two of you.  Create tee-
shirts with the same action request along with the URL.  Use
a table covering that is the same color as the tee-shirt to
help support your message and attractiveness.

8.  Transit ads.  What type of transportation is available
in the areas you focus in?  Is there massive transit like
buses or metro?  Don’t forget taxi cabs, inside and out, as
well as the taxi stands.  Find out where their direct phone
lines are.  Sometimes, yet rare, you can place an Avery
sticker next to.  One sign works with well if you have this
ability on your web site:  "Take a virtual tour of our
latest properties [URL]."

9.  This one is something I dreamed up and it really works.
Rig a button that people can press on the side of your car
window that gives off a recording of the latest houses you
available for sale.  Then park in obvious places for people
to see the button.  Add a sign on the inside of the window
giving them permission to press the button.  Caution, this
doesn’t work with some car alarm systems.

10.  Merchants.  Where do you get your dry cleaning done?
Hair cuts, massages, or other frequented stores.  Do you
have some favorite restaurants?  Can you stock a business
card holder by the cash register?  As a previous owner of
restaurants, the one I like best is when the real estate
agent paid for part of or the whole cost of the menus.  In
exchange we allowed them to create some marketing
information on the menus.

Testing is always important when trying new things.  In
selling real estate, uniqueness is the key.  As said in the
latest National Association of Realtors 2003 survey, most
people perceive all real estate agents as being the same.
But you know you aren’t.  Yet, how are you showing it?  Be
comfortable with being uncomfortable.  Create play and fun
and stretch with your marketing.  Let it be as unique as you
are and then smile all the way to the bank.

Catherine Franz, business coach.  Previously a real
estate agent and exec with National Association of Realtors.
Additional articles and ideas about marketing to attract business: 
http://www.abundancecenter.com
Blog: http://abundance.blogs.com

There’s such a thing as taking search engine optimization too far.  I’m not talking about black hat versus white hat, things that might get you banned versus staying pristine.  I’m talking about keyword stuffing in the title.  As far as search engine optimization goes, there’s nothing wrong with it.  You might very well make it to #1 with a title like "Widgets, Black Widgets, Home Widgets, Cheap Widgets."

But who’s going to click on that?

Oh, I’m sure some people will.  But I’m betting the guy who’s at #3 with "Widget Information" is going to get more visitors.

Sometimes we webmasters spend so much time trying to second-guess the search engines that we forget potential visitors, people, are the ones we really need to impress.  Yes, it’s important to get onto that first page of search engine results, but once you’re there, think of ways to entice people with your titles. 

I’m not saying to get rid of keywords in your titles altogether; instead, take your main keyword and work your title around it.

So, what makes a good title?

First off, get rid of the mass of keywords separated by commas.  If people were looking for synonyms, they’d grab a thesaurus rather than popping onto Google.  Instead, put yourself in the shoes of the person looking for information on widgets.  If you were the one doing the looking, what kind of title would attract you?

You really can’t go wrong with Keyword Information or some variation of that title.  After all, that’s what most people are looking for, information.  However, that can be a bit dry.

You may want to consider employing what writers call a hook.  This is something that grabs your attention and makes you want to continue reading in order to satisfy your curiosity.  Journalists employ this method all the time to increase newspaper sales. 

Some examples might be:

Widgets, Bad for Your Health?
Are Widgets Safe for Your Children?
Widgets Increase Sales… If Used Correctly

Be creative.  Whatever you do, make sure your titles are cohesive.  Think like your visitors, not like the search engines.  Lure the visitor into clicking on your site instead of the nine other sites listed on the search engine results page.  You might just be surprised at the increase in traffic you receive.

TC Thorn writes content for numerous web sites, including a number she owns such as http://www.webmasterarticles.net where this article first appeared.

Reading the postings in different Newsgroups it becomes clear that the "I does not work for me.." statements comes from one very clear reason: not enough Traffic.

The Ability to generate targeted and low cost Traffic is crucial for the success of every internet business.
Well, what is "enough Traffic" ? Let´s take some minutes to analyze the traffic needs in detail.

Let´s say you would have a single business opportunity that you would like to advertise. This opportunity allows you to earn, let´s say 10$ per Sale.

Furthermore you would like to earn 500$ in month from this opportunity alone. So would need 50 sales during this period.

In order to determine the number of clicks (traffic) you will need, you need to know the conversion rate of your opportunity. This rate itself will depend on how targeted your traffic is. In order to make it easy, let´s assume your conversion rate is 4%, meaning that 4% of your potential buyers will purchase your product/opportunity etc.

This means that from 100 Clicks, you will get 4 sales. So you need 25 Clicks in order to make a sale (100/4). This is in fact a good conversion rate! Usually you will have such high conversions only for free stuff or by having an extremly well targeted traffic.

Considering that you wish to have 50 sales in a month, you will need thus 1250 Clicks per month. If your conversion rate would be 0.4 % instead of 4%, you would need 10 times more, 12.500 Clicks per month.

Free Advertising
So the next question would be where do you obtain such traffic.
Free Advertising One easy source of free traffic are Free Ads. Just type in Google "Free Classifieds" to find hundreds of free Ad sources.
I personally use US-Free Ads, since they are free and offer multiple helpful options, like Tracking, Add a Picture, Paypal Button and many other useful features.

Free Advertising using Free Classifieds can be a very time consuming task and the results are overestimated at the beginning. It is recommended to consider the option to buy "featured" Ads to reduce the manual effort and maximize the results.

Traffic Exchanges
An additional source of Free Traffic are Traffic Exchanges. The working principle is similar: you provide traffic (i.e. by setting an especial Website as your Homepage in the Browser) and you get back traffic from other users doing the same. Usually you get Traffic in Ratio 1:2, this means you need to provide two page views to get one free page view for your business.
This sounds simple but is very practical: let´s assume you have a business selling food for pets. Obviously you are not interested to views websites related with other people trying to sell you the same. But on the other side you may be interesting to see other websites about Health&Nutrition. So you will get (=traffic exchange) Advertising from this Genre if your are interested to do so and exchange traffic for your Pet business.
So the more people use Traffic Exchanges, the more views you will get to your business. Furthermore, you will get additional page views (=traffic) by referring new customers. Most of the Traffic Exchanges Systems provide also PRO Memberships, where you get paid if someone you have referred upgrade himself to PRO.

Traffic Exchanges have also a big advantage in comparison with Pay-Per-Click engines: the "cost" of the traffic does not increase with the number of advertisers.

There are hundreds of Traffic Exchanges in the Web. I personally recommend to choose one of the "TOP 10 Traffic Exchanges" tested by TrafficHoopla.
This company performs regular tests of the most popular Traffic Exchanges systems on the Net and publish the results in their website.

Viral Increase of Traffic
I had mentioned that you can "earn" additional Traffic by referring new users to your favorit Traffic Exchange.  The interesting aspect of TrafficHoopla is that you can join several TrafficExchanges and advertise them with your unique TrafficHoopla URL.  This URL can be advertised also in your favorite Traffic Exchange programm. So the more you advertise this URL, the more people you refer to this system and thus, the more referrals you get in other Traffic Exchanges you had joined via TrafficHoopla. The result is a "Viral" increase of traffic. With some time you will have enough Traffic to advertise your Business Opportunity. Once you get enough referrals, it is recommended to join the PRO Version of your program in order to get paid and earn a 2nd stream of income.

Alex Timaios is an international Internet Marketer based in Germany, specialized in Residual Income Generation, Home Business and Traffic Building.
http://www.101homebiz.com and http://www.101workathome.biz.
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You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are included.

Power Training for your Website – Build that traffic

By Marc Lindsay

We all know what it is like to get in the gym and do a darn good workout don’t we??

It feels exhilarating and you walk away with a sense of achievement and that you have done something right to your body

Well I was in the gym the other day doing the strength component of my training and I it made me question myself.  What is it that makes us bigger, grow more muscle, and get stronger. 

Or in the Internet side of things create more traffic flow, have more links coming in and achieve a higher Search Engine Ranking.

They both require constant attention and work,  It is better to work two or three major area’s at the same time doing “power movements” as this creates more “bang for your buck” so to say.

Well I have taken the major concepts of what is working for me in the gym and applied it to Internet Marketing.  “POWER MOVEMENTS”

So what is this amazing “power movement” you are talking about.

It really is simple…… You are reading it.

That’s right by writing your own unique articles and submitting them to article submission sites you can do a Power Workout for your website by growing the three major groups.  More traffic, more incoming links, higher search engine ranking.

It doesn’t have to exactly be about what you are offering as there are plenty of article accepting sites around.  It could be on how to play golf properly but it is the recognition at the bottom of the article that matters.

A simple signature with a short description of your site.  Aswell as the web address of your site.  Similar to the one at the bottom of this article. 

This is the “power movement” I am speaking of and trust me if you place one article a week and submit it to as many sites as you can then you will very quickly see a rise in incoming links, search engine rankings and traffic to your site for years to come.

A lot of articles you write may even be picked up by other sites that you haven’t even submitted to yet.  This is the beauty of it all.

Write one small article and reap the “power movements” for years to come.

And that is it.

See told you it was simple.

Click below to find out how many thousands of sites are waiting for your hot article now

Sites that accept articles

Or alternatively you could do a search at

http://www.yahoo.com  With the search phrase “article submission”

For something so simple it is worth getting over your fears and as Nike would say “Just Do It”

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About The Author

Marc Lindsay has been working his own Work from Home business for over 2 years now.  For more information, tips, tricks, hot products and articles check out http://www.work-from-home-blueprint.com