Internet and Businesses Articles

Creatively marketing your corporate site takes time in the set up but you will learn that building your customers isn't about marketing your products but getting your name and reputation into the minds of internet customers.

I have randomly chosen Watkins to design a marketing approach but you will see how to apply this concept to any direct sales company.

Now let's sort through the steps of developing your online marketing plan.

Become an expert.

Be an expert on your products, your corporate website, and your current and potential customers. If you don't see yourself as an expert about your products, your company... that is your first step.

Don't try to market or pay for advertising without knowing your products and the people that would love them!

When you are comfortable with the products you offer on your corporate website begin to brainstorm about how to connect your products to internet customers.

On paper list the different categories of products with a list of potential "markets"
you can target. You are ready to start your marketing plan itself.

Find your niche market.

In our example of Watkins, there is a potential market with women that are homemakers, enjoy cooking, love to entertain or create family memories with cooking traditions but remember men love to cook too.

There is a very wide range of the ages, the groups within that cook and entertain. By studying your potential customers, a theme will emerge.

Let's look at "cooking from scratch."

To know your customers, do this exercise:

Think cooking. Think old fashioned values. Think food and family traditions.

Where would they go on the internet for ideas, menus, recipes and more? Use search engines for your initial search to find a few solid popular websites. As most well built website have links within their categories, visit their links or resources to find other similar sites.

Look for homemaking, cooking, familiy focused and entertaining sites with message boards, newsletters and articles.

You are finally nudging closer to your niche market, your potential customers.

Once you have found a few websites that cater to your market, stop and study the sites. Read the articles and visit the message boards. Message boards often have posts asking for advice or recipes. Articles may have ratings by visitors which tell you more about what readers want to see. learn what kind of information your potential customers may be looking for, what they want to learn and do.

Sign up for the site's newsletter. You will learn a great deal from the newsletter. Read the articles, hints and ads in the newsletter.

Start writing.

Submit your articles, recipes and kitchen hints both to site owners that accept submissions but you can also contact the publisher of the newsletters too.

It's very important to remember not to write about your products Write about anything connected to the homemaking, cooking, entertaining site....keep your written article focused along the theme of the website you have found.

Your articles should reflect your knowledge, your passion whether it be crafts for kids or organizing a closet.

Sell outside the article.

You do not need to sell within the article or post. On the power of your words, your writing, they will learn about you, your business in your "resource box." When a reader enjoys your article, connects with your writing, they will feel compelled to click on your link.

You have made your first contact with your market through creative marketing.

This is your best marketing strategy for your corporate website. Continue to post ads on message boards that allow you to but often that serves you best with recruiting for your direct sale team.

Your products, whether it is Discovery Toys or Tupperware, are best presented online in your resource box as you build your reputation as fun, knowledgeable and credible. Over time and repeated exposure online, your name will become synonymous with your product and your company.

That once limiting corporate website will be the link between you and your customer. Your success with your business and corporate site will be based on creating a market for You.

Tammy Ames
Owner of Wahm Connections http://www.wahmconnections.com - Publisher of Wahm Connections Weekly Online. Send a blank email to wahmconnections-subscribe@topica.com to subscribe to her dynamic weekly ezine available in both email text or html online. Free weekly subscriber ads available.

With the New Year upon us yet again, it's time to prepare for the successes of 2005. Did you watch with envy last year as your competitors dominated your industry? Do you think your site is doing just fine because no one has ever called to complain? Well here's some food for thought: 96% of all prospects will click over to your competitor if they encounter a problem on your website.

While you're resolving to get fit, quit smoking and pay off some debts, we're offering up some New Year's resolutions for your business. Learn how to ethically kick your online competitors to the curb!

Resolve to...

...Make Content & Relevancy a Top Priority

It is, after all, the information highway. People search the Web for information-so give the people what they want. If you want to generate qualified leads and produce more sales, then continually updating your website with new and useful content must be at the top of your priority list.

Search engines seek out relevant, up-to-date information when they rank sites for specific keywords and phrases. If you don't have timely informative content, you won't get a good ranking; and without a good ranking, prospects can't find you. But that's just the beginning of your online demise. Even if you manage to achieve a good ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs), your content must intrigue visitors to return to your site regularly.

Studies reveal that online consumers take several passes at a website before making a purchase.

Website maintenance is time-consuming and it's easy to put unpaid man-hours on the back burner. But why would potential customers revisit your site if the last archived newsletter were dated two years ago? Or if your "Coming Events" page lists tradeshows held six months ago? They won't-they'll likely skip over to the competition in search of up-to-date information.

... Increase Your Site's Visibility & Improve its Performance

Once your website is updated (for the time being) with informative content, the next step is to implement some SEO solutions to gain higher search rankings. The purpose of these SEO techniques is twofold:

1. Create Awareness: Carefully selected keywords and phrases, worked seamlessly throughout your copy and in meta tags, will help your site gain higher placements in SERPs.

2. Increase Sales: Once prospects are on your site, savvy marketing writers will have used the power of persuasion in the copy to turn first-time visitors into loyal customers.

...Increase Your Return On Investment (ROI)

We cannot stress this enough ... in order for your website to be extremely effective, achieving an astounding ROI, you must have a detailed plan:

* Analyze your SWOT

Perform an in-depth analysis to compare the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of your competitor's online presence to your own. A qualified SEO firm can enhance your site's usability and navigation, implement ethical optimization techniques, and provide eye-catching design.

* Evaluate your website development goals

It's never too late to write or re-evaluate your website's mission statement-not necessarily for publication, but rather to create your own benchmarks. This will help you set goals and concentrate your efforts on critical issues to achieve and exceed those goals.

* Know your audience

An old adage says: "you can't be everything to everyone." Fortunately, your website can be various things to various audiences. Success comes from having a clear understanding of your target market(s). By creating diverse navigation paths and reader-specific content-for buyers, vendors, job seekers or investors-your conversion rates will increase dramatically.

* Enhance website usability

Effective website navigation must flow effortlessly. If visitors cannot quickly and easily pinpoint the information they seek, they're very likely to leave your site and click to the competition.

An IBM study reveals that every dollar invested to increase usability earns $10-$100 in benefits, winning customer satisfaction and loyalty.

* Measure success and failure

Read your log files and tracking tools! Website traffic analysis is essential to accurately measure your site's performance. In-depth analysis will show you how to increase traffic, trace your search engine referrals, monitor link campaigns, and make necessary changes to achieve your desired results.

...Apply the Power of SEO

Your website has the power to be a highly effective marketing tool-but just because you built it doesn't mean they'll come. If you optimize it, however, they're much more likely to come ... and stay a while.

Anyone can learn search engine optimization and website usability. But if lack of time and interest is holding you back, enlist the help of website optimizers and SEO copywriters to complement your design team and ultimately increase revenue.

A word to the wise: ensure that the SEO firm you choose works strictly within the confines of best practices-safe and ethical search engine optimization strategies. Unethical SEO tactics may seriously harm your rankings, and even get your site banned from search engines altogether.

On behalf of Word Associates and U-C WEBS, we wish you a happy, healthy & profitable 2005!

~~
Nardo Kuitert is a Website Optimizer with U-C WEBS (http://www.u-cwebs.com/). A website is like a magnet; does your website pull visitors in, or push them away? A heuristic usability evaluation will provide you with a first step towards greater visitor conversions.

~~
Aimee Cremasco, Founder and Sr. Copywriter of Word Associates (http://www.wordassociates.ca/), produces compelling content to help websites achieve top search engine rankings & ultimately increase conversion rates. Wouldn't your site benefit from a content evaluation?

Keywords in Search Engine Optimizing and Search Engine Marketing are the building blocks and foundation of your website on the search engines. If your foundation is weak or poorly put together your webpages won't have much to be based upon for the engines to rank with.

Therefore, careful consideration is of utmost importance when choosing your keywords for your webpages, and so if you choose and target the wrong keywords, all your efforts will be wasted.

When having chosen your keywords, you could be in one of two scenarios: You were able to get a top 10 position in a major search engine and were very excited about the traffic that flooded in, or You got a top 10 ranking, but only a few visitors trickled in to see your site.

Whats happened?

Well, in the first scenario, the person selected a keyword or phrase that was very popular and chose correctly, and lots a people searched on it, rather the other person optimized his/her page for a keyword phrase that not many people searched on, therefore received very little traffic.

So the million dollar question is then: How do you know how to choose the right ones to optimize your website for?

I'll first mention a few ways in which to choose your keywords wisely and then ways to see how popular they are.

1. Think in terms of your customer, put yourself in your customers shoes, what would your customer search for to find you? and
2. Focus your keywords into short, 2 or 3 word phrases (Studies show the majority search for 2 or 3 word phrases)

You can use the above tips in conjunction with the following tools.

http://www.nichebot.com https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

The above sites will be very useful, in choosing your keywords, so use them to your advantage.

The overture tool, shows the phrase and the number of times a keyword phrase was searched for in the preceding month, while the Google Tool is used for adwords, although I myself and know of others that still use it for general keyword knowledge, and the nichebot site is very useful and a knowledgeable tool for "spotting" the niche words that are being searched for.

Ideally, you want to target keywords and phrases that are searched with some frequency, and that are specific to your Web site, but less competitive, or put another way, think and choose popular keywords that your competitors have overlooked, and which are still popular.

The best thing to try to do is to target multi-word keyword phrases that give you the highest quality leads. For example; if your targeting "software" don't just optimize your page for that word "software" chose a focused niche phrase to target, think in terms of "childrens software" or "educational software",... get the idea?

Think focus?

Also, a small addendum I saw recently on Webposition.com; "...If you take the time to target the RIGHT keywords,[...]you'll be ahead of 99% of the world and you'll be generating more traffic with less effort. Work smarter, not harder is what we always say!"

To sum up,... put yourself in your customers shoes when choosing our keywords, what do you want your customer to search for so they find you online, and input that into a 2 or 3 word phrase, while using the above tools to assist you in this process.

This article was written by Burke Ferguson of AltaCanWeb.com. Burke holds both a BSc. degree in Computer Science as well Certification in Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Strategies. He also regularly publishes The ACE! newsletter, in which he shares his experience, methods, and knowledge with others. Burke can be contacted by his main website AltaCanWeb.com or The ACE! ezine.

If you've been developing websites on Mars for the past few years then you'll be forgiven for not knowing about web usability. You'll still be creating splash intro pages, having pages with massive download times and using more images than you can shake a stick at. Well, back in Earth these days have long gone and today web usability rules the web development world. For those of you who have been on Mars please read some of the things that Jakob Nielson has to say at http://www.useit.com/alertbox and try to catch up.

As for the rest of us Earth-based developers, well we've learnt a whole bunch about usability and we're all using it as best we can in our websites. Right, guys? After all, web usability does have huge benefits ( see http://www.webcredible.co.uk/benefits/web-usability.shtml ).

Now that usable websites have become so commonplace, especially among the major web players, it's time to start looking to the future. Suddenly, a usable website isn't going to be enough to separate us from our competitors (apart from those using the developers who've been based on Mars). There is a solution. It's two words long. Enter our new best friend...

Web credibility.

What is web credibility & why is it important?

According to BJ Fogg, the world's leading researcher on web credibility, web credibility is about making your website in such a way that it comes across as trustworthy and knowledgeable. Don't just take my word for it - read his book if you like (http://www.persuasivetech.info).

Fogg will tell you, as can I, and numerous other organisations, that a credible website can reap huge benefits on to your website and your business. So, here's a few statistics to prove this point:

- Just 52.8% of web users believe online information to be credible (source: UCLA)

- Four in five users say that being able to trust the information on a site is very important to them in deciding to visit a website (source: Princeton Survey Research Associates)

So, web credibility's pretty important then. But how do you implement it on to your website? Fear not, all the answers lie within the realms of this article. Now, before I go further, I must stress that most of this stuff falls under the category of 'it's obvious once you know it'. You know, like if someone sets you a puzzle and you can't do it but when they tell you the answer it's really obvious. Web credibility is all common sense - you just don't tend to think about this stuff. So without further ado, here are five guidelines for making a credible website.

1. You must prove there's a real organisation behind your website

Anyone can put up a website promising to deliver the 'best service at the lowest prices'. Web users must be able to believe there's a real organisation behind your website. A few things you can do are:

- Make it very easy to contact you

- Link to external websites that reference your organisation

- Provide staff bios

- Show photos of the office, staff, products etc.

This basically says that you should have a really good contact us and about us section. Don't bury your contact us link in some obscure place in the website or on the page. Make out like you really want your site visitors to get in contact with you. In fact, I won't talk anymore about your contact us page because Miles Burke's has already written an excellent article about it, The Lost Art of Conversation - Encouraging Contact Online (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/encouraging-contact-online).

As for the about us section, don't underestimate its importance. Don't be afraid to show who you are (stand tall and be proud!), what you stand for, what your goals are, and a bit about your history (of the organisation, not you). People will read this stuff - it certainly won't be the first thing they'll read on your website but it could be the last thing they read before deciding whether or not to do business with you.

Can you think of other ways you can prove your organisation's real? Have a look at a website you visit quite often - what is it about this website that you trust?

2. Your website needs to provide 'sensitive' information

A website is akin to a one-way conversation between you and your site visitors where you have 100% control over the dialogue. If site users perceive you to be lacking in credibility then you'll be unable to defend yourself. As such, you must ensure that you answer any questions your site visitors may have, for example:

- What is the purpose of your organisation?

- How much does your product cost?

- What happens if I'm not happy with your service

- What will you do with my email address once I give it to you?

There are about 35 million websites on the Internet - by 2014 there'll be an estimated 150 million, not including personal websites. With so many people online and so many websites competing with yours, if you can't persuade Internet users to be loyal to your website then someone else will.

3. All statements should be backed up by third-party evidence

"We helped our clients achieve an average of 70% growth last year." Really? Well prove it! Every single point you make on your website must, without fail, be backed up with hard evidence - preferably from a third-party website. How else can a reader know for sure that you're telling the truth?

Client testimonials, for example, are great - they're even better if the testimonial links to the client's website. You can improve them even more if the name of the person making the testimonial is linked to their bio on their website. You could notch up even more credibility points if the testimonial itself is on the client's website and you link to it!

If you've won any awards or belong to any industry bodies, then proudly display these emblems too. Even better, have them link to the external website. Better still, would be a direct link to the section of the website showing your membership details or a list of the award winners.

4. There has to be proof that the organisation is growing and has clients

An organisation that can prove it has clients and is experiencing growth instantly achieves credibility. By showing you've offered your services plenty of times before, and expect to do so in the future, your organisation comes across as being firmly established within your industry. You can prove this by providing:

- A client list

- Testimonials

- Case studies of your work

- A latest news section

- A jobs page

- Free newsletter

5. Your website needs to have an air of professionalism and confidence

Your website is your organisation's online representation - it's essential that it matches up in quality to the rest of your marketing materials. Even if you don't think your website's important to the success of your organization, (potential) clients will make judgments about your organisation based on your website.

So, what is the number one most important aspect of Web credibility? The about us section? No. Quality of outbound links? No-siree. Studies have consistently proven that the most important criteria of web credibility is... the way the website looks. That's it.

It's been suggested that this is due to the short amount of time we spend on websites so we tend to rely on initial judgements. Make sure that you create a great first impression by having a crisp, professional layout with sharp graphics. Other good things to do are:

- Provide some free information to prove your expertise

- Ensure there are no dead links

- Send out an automated confirmation e-mail when someone contacts you

There are many more! Just visit any website you perceive to be professional and confident and see what they do.

This article was written by Trenton Moss. He's crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy ( Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk ) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.

With more and more countries around the world passing laws about blind and disabled access to the Internet (including the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK), web accessibility has been thrown into the spotlight of the online community. This article attempt to put a stop to the misinformation that has been thrown around and tell you the truth behind web accessibility.

1. Creating a text-only equivalent is sufficient

Creating a separate text-only equivalent can lead to a number of problems:

- A text-only version is not necessarily accessible

- Two versions of the same website represents a huge time and money investment for you

- Your primary site may not be accessible to many users

- An 'extra' accessible website for blind and disabled users can be one more way to make them feel marginalised from mainstream society

Web accessibility isn't just about blind and disabled Internet users being able to use your site - it's about everyone being able to access it successfully. It really doesn't have to take very much time or money to make your website accessible.

2. It's complicated and expensive to make my website accessible

To develop an accessible website from scratch will cost virtually the same as to develop a website that isn't accessible. A very large, highly inaccessible website may take a bit more time and money to fix up, although the basic layout and design usually need not change.

Web accessibility is not complicated and anyone with basic web design skills can easily implement it.

3. Accessible and attractive web design can't go together

Many advocates of web accessibility tend to have rather dull, unattractive websites. This is unfortunate, as web accessibility need not affect the design of the website in any way whatsoever. To fully dispel this myth, have a look at the CSS Zen Garden ( http://www.csszengarden.com ) - a beautiful website offering 100% accessibility.

4. Accessible websites stifle creativity

Web accessibility actually places very few restrictions on website design. In fact, as with regular websites, you're only really limited by your imagination when creating accessible websites. Have a look at the CSS Zen Garden ( http://www.csszengarden.com ) to see for yourself that accessibility doesn't have to affect creativity in any way.

5. My site visitors don't have a problem accessing my website

Not necessarily. See Benefits of an accessible website - part 1 ( http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/benefits-of-accessible-websites-1.shtml ) to see just how many Internet users you may be excluding from your site. You can be sure that with 35 million websites to choose from it's unlikely that a site visitor prevented from accessing your website is going to waste his time contacting you to ask you to fix the problem.

6. Web accessibility places restrictions on the web page design

Not at all. As with regular websites, you're only limited by your imagination when creating accessible websites. Text size can be as large or as small you like (provided it's resizable), you can use any colour scheme you like (provided colour isn't the only way you differentiate information) and you can use as many images as you like (provided an alternative description is provided).

These accessibility provisos mostly happen behind the scenes and don't affect the presentation of the website.

7. Blind and disabled people don't use the Internet

On the contrary, blind and disabled people benefit from the Internet perhaps more than anyone else.

For example, visually impaired people have to phone up a supermarket when they want to go shopping to inform them of their arrival. When they get there, a store assistant will accompany them around the store. Through accessible websites blind people can now shop at home, and in their own time.

Conclusion

Web accessibility isn't brain science. It's not just about disabled users being able to access your website - it's about everyone being able to access your website, including people using handheld devices, WebTV and in-car browsers. Any web developer with basic HTML and CSS design knowledge, and a bit of time on their hands, can easily learn and implement web accessibility.

Trenton Moss is crazy about web accessibility and usability - so crazy that he went and started his own web accessibility and usability consultancy ( Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk ) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.

There's been widespread speculation about the new legislation being introduced under the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act), which will ensure that websites are accessible to blind and disabled users. Try to find specific information about it on the Internet and chances are you'll come up empty handed.

The RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) and the DRC (Disability Rights Commission), two of the most renowned advocates for the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) and accessible websites, have no specific information about the laws and what websites specifically need to do in order to meet the legal requirements.

So, what does the law state?

Part III of the Disability Discrimination Act refers to the provision of goods, facilities and services. The Code of Practice, which specifically mentions websites, can be downloaded in its entirety from the DRC website (http://www.drc-gb.org/open4all/law/Code%20of%20Practice.pdf 676kb).

The relevant quotes from this 175-page document are:

2.2 (p7): "The Act makes it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service which it provides to members of the public."

4.7 (p39): "From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services."

2.13 – 2.17 (p11-13): "What services are affected by the Act? An airline company provides a flight reservation and booking service to the public on its website. This is a provision of a service and is subject to the act."

5.23 (p71): "For people with visual impairments, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include ... accessible websites."

5.26 (p68): "For people with hearing disabilities, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include ... accessible websites. "
When does the law come into force?

It's widely believed that the new laws will be implemented in October of this year, when the final part of the DDA comes into force. This final piece of legislation actually refers to service providers having to consider making permanent physical adjustments to their premises and is not related to the Internet in any way.

The law about accessible websites came into force on 1st October 1999 (http://www.drc-gb.org/open4all/law/code.asp) and the Code of Practice for this section of the Act was published on 27th May 2002 (http://www.hmso.gov.uk/si/si2002/20020720.htm). This means that the majority of websites are already in breach of the law.

Can you be sued?

Well, probably. The RNIB claim that they've considered taking up a number of legal cases against organisations with regard to their websites. When they raised the accessibility issues of the website under the DDA, companies have typically made the necessary changes, rather than facing the prospect of legal action.

The DRC has now published their findings from their formal investigation into 1000 websites. (http://www.drc-gb.org/publicationsandreports/2.pdf). If your website was included then you will have to start thinking about making it accessible to all web users in the very near future.

What do you need to do to comply?

It's widely believed that if, or perhaps more appropriately when, a case makes it to court that the W3C accessibility guidelines will be used to assess a website's accessibility and ultimately decide the outcome of the case. The W3C is the Internet governing body and its web accessibility guidelines can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist.html.

To further complicate matters, the W3C offers three different levels of compliance. Priority 1 guidelines, (which must be satisfied according to the W3C) will almost certainly have to be adhered to. Priority 2 guidelines (which should be satisfied and are the EU recommended level of compliance (http://www.disabilityworld.org/09-10_02/access/internetaccess.shtml), or some part of, will probably also need to be adhered to too.

The courts will also no doubt take guidance from the outcome of an Australian case in 2000, when a blind man successfully sued the Sydney Olympics organising committee over their inaccessible website (http://www.contenu.nu/socog.html).

This article was written by Trenton Moss. He's crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy ( Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk ) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.

URL rewriting are major needs for your sites that produce a dynamic pages like PHP pages with redirection pages inside your index page.

What is APACHE URL Mod Rewrite ?

URL Mod Rewrite is a Apache web server module that can manipulate your URL on fly when a visitors join your URL pages.

A mod rewrite mode is usefull to changes your original URL to all types of the URL you dreamed about.

In this link below you will find some solutions guides to use the mod rewrite scripts :

A Users Guide to URL Rewriting with the Apache Webserver

http://www.engelschall.com/pw/apache/rewriteguide/#ToC1

Why do you need URL mod_rewriting?

#1 URL manipulating

If you want to hide your original URL and what scripts that you used on it. You can use mod rewrite.

#2 Can be usefull for a Content Management System Based on Text.
Content Management System has been used by 80% webmasters in the World.
Ussualy they used mod rewrite to move the document root to the top level priority.

For an example :

if yout want to changes your URL from :

www.yourdomain.com/e/www

And then by using mod rewrite to change the URL to this :

www.yourdomain.com/

This module was usefull to make your web URLs look more profesional.

#3 Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine will crawl your site with their bot scripts. By the research shows that most Search Engines were prefer a HTML pages rather than a Dynamic pages.

So that they can increase your link popularity and make they easy to crawl through your site content.

By using mod_rewrite URL manipulation , you can changes your dynamic pages to a html URL address.

For an example :

www.yourdomain.com/index.php?screen=home

You can changes it to this by mod_rewrite:

www.yourdomain.com/index.html

In other words: With mod_rewrite you either shoot yourself in the foot the first time and never use it again or love it for the rest of your life because of its power.

This paper tries to give you a few initial success events to avoid the first case by presenting already invented solutions to you.

About an Author

Handry Teguh is a web designer and articles publishers at http://www.buaya.com And now his job was an IT Solution Consultant and Implementator in security and storages solutions of Multi Vendors Product like : CA, MICROSOFT, GFI, SYMANTEC, CCTV.

Many websites I come across don't have a single link to another website. Ask the webmaster why not, and the answer you get is simple enough: "If I link to other websites people might leave my site." At this point I break the news that site visitors will leave your site. And there's nothing you can do about this.

Site visitors won't leave your site because you provide links to external sites. They'll leave for one of two reasons:

- They've found what they were looking for and no longer have a reason to stay on your website

- They can't find the information they're looking for and leave to seek it elsewhere

"OK, so site visitors are going to leave my site. But why should I hunt around for websites to link to?" I can think of four reasons why linking out is good for you and will ultimately increase traffic to your website:

Proof there's a real organisation behind the website

One of the best ways to prove your organisation really exists is to link to other websites that reference you. Any website willing to mention your organisation is in effect providing a reference for you. Just 52.8% of web users believe online information to have credibility (source: http://ccp.ucla.edu/pdf/UCLA-Internet-Report-Year-Three.pdf) and four in five users say that being able to trust the information on a site is very important to them in deciding to visit a website (source: http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/news/1_TOC.htm).

Links about your organisation can include:

- Press articles

- Affiliation listings

- Professional association membership details

- Awards your organisation has won

- Articles published by a member of your organisation

- Directory listings (such as Yahoo! or the Open directory)

Anyone can put up a website making whatever kind of claims they want to. Have a look at the fantastic Christian women's wrestling website at http://www.jesus21.com/poppydixon/sports/cww.html. It's got quite a lot of information about them and lots of photos. And it's 100% fake.

Backs up your arguments

Ensure that all statements about your organisation are backed up by third party websites. For example, if you sell toys it's very easy to make a statement such as, "We're the number one online toy seller in the country!" Anyone can make this statement, so prove that it is true by linking to an external website showing a list of the top online toy sellers last year.

Most of the time your site visitors probably won't follow these links, but that doesn't matter - the important thing is that you've shown evidence to back up the claims you're making.

Benefit to your site visitors

The Internet is designed for users to flow through it from one website to the next - don't make your website the last one in the flow. If you know of websites that you find really useful, and you think your site visitors might too, be sure to link to them. By offering a range of useful links you may even come across as an industry expert and someone who really knows their stuff.

When providing links make sure you do so at appropriate times. Don't relegate external links to a links page - site visitors aren't so likely to visit this page as a links page doesn't immediately address their needs. Instead, provide links as and when they're appropriate to the content of each page.

For example, if you run an accountancy firm you may wish to link to a website that has an up-to-date reference guide about new tax laws in the field of accounting. You don't have the time to provide that kind of regularly updated information on your website but your site visitors would find it really useful. Help out your site visitors and they'll hold your organisation in a positive light.

Search engine benefits

One of the ways search engines try to work out what your website is about is by analysing its inbound and outbound links. The more confidence a search engine has of what your website's about, all other things being equal, the higher search engine ranking you'll achieve. By providing outbound links to related sites you actually help the search engines analyse your site and therefore help your search ranking.

Jon Ricerca did a mini-analysis to see if outbound links affect search engine rankings and his results were pretty conclusive: web pages with more outbound links generally achieved higher search rankings ( see http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/search-engine-optimisation/number-links.shtml ). Be warned though, an inbound link is worth far more than an outbound link so do not link to your competitor's websites!

Conclusion

Don't be afraid to link out. Your site visitors will appreciate you introducing them to useful websites, you can increase your credibility and you can achieve a higher search engine ranking. So check your favourites folder and if you think your site visitors would benefit from any of the websites there be sure to include them in an appropriate place on your site.

This article was written by Trenton Moss. He's crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy ( Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk ) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.

“How do I improve web site sales figures?” The CEO roared at the web developer. The web developer looked at his boss a little confused and mumbled something about it not being his core competence with him being a programmer and all. So next the CEO went to his marketing department and bellowed “How do I improve our web site sales conversion rates?” A few mouths opened as if to speak but nothing came out until finally exasperated the CEO tearing at his hair in frustration turned to a guy painting the wall and said, “Can you answer this question? How do I increase my web site sales figures?”

The painter smiled knowingly, winked, dipped his brush into his paint tin, before evenly applying more paint to the wall in calm considered strokes. Then without looking away from his work he continued, “When you asked me to paint this wall, you knew why you wanted it painted. Yes, I told you what it was going to cost you and I told you why it was going to cost you what it’s costing you. But you knew what the problem was, you knew you had a crack appearing in the paint. What I would do is calm down, take a few deep breaths and ask yourself the same questions. First you need to know exactly what it is that isn’t working, find the cracks in your wall.”

The CEO laughed, slapped his head and went back to his office to consider this gem of wisdom. This article explains what the CEO should’ve done before asking impossible questions of his staff and what I’ve learned from our own failures and successes.

You Need To Know, Not Guess.

It’s easy to bawl at people when things don’t work out and you don’t sell what you expected to sell through your web site. It’s easy to blame the programmer who talks about missing include files and something called ‘pee h pee’ or ‘asp’ not working properly, as if a venomous snake could help you.

What will help is finding out what the problem is so you can learn how to put it right. When it comes to web site sales, we’ve learned that it could be any number of a great many things that you’re doing wrong. So first you need to diagnose the problem.

1) Get Web Analytics

Start measuring the website traffic. This is the only surefire way you can learn about how people do or don’t do what you want them to do. Now people keep telling me that web analytics is a science all to itself. I find it easy now because I know what to look for given a particular problem. I used to get things wrong all the time, but practice makes perfect. Getting things wrong is a pain in the rear, especially if it costs money, but I put it down to research and development. Simply put if you make a mistake put it back to the way it was before the mistake. Now I just watch out for trends which I think are good and trends which I think are bad.

For instance, one trend I look for are pages where people enter your site and leave those pages without doing anything. This is called a bounce rate. If you have lots of bounces you have a problem. Once for example, I released an article which was re-printed in a very popular newsletter. I got about 6000 free visitors from a very on target newsletter, so with our good monthly conversion rate you would expect I would get lots of subscriptions to my site.

Wrong! My analytics program told me that I was getting a 90% bounce rate, which in all honesty infuriated me. So I went to the article in question and compared it to another article which had a low bounce rate of about 38%. The one with the better bounce rate had four related links within the article content (often referred to as embedded links). Had I simply put embedded links in the other article I might have reduced bounce by 50% or more which would then transpose to 3000 more people getting deeper into my site.

Had 3000 more people got deeper into my site (and further into the persuasive process), I know that more of them would have subscribed than before. It’s just a statistical fact that when people read more than one page they subscribe with greater frequency. I checked, only 9% of my visitors subscribed immediately last month from arriving at our site, the other 91% took more than 2 pages before giving me their email address. In fact since we added embedded links to all our pages we have reduced overall bounce considerably and subscriptions have improved as a whole.

The same thing happens with sales. Reduce bounce to your landing pages by comparing the ones that sell well to the ones that don’t. It’s a method that’s more scientific than guessing and it will improve sales if you gradually improve bounce rates site wide. If you don’t have any good bounce rates on sales pages, test something, which brings me nicely onto the next way to know what the problems are.

2) Test things.

You can’t test anything until you have got web analytics. So if you haven’t already done so, do not pass go, do not collect $200 just go and get a good web analytics system. There are plenty to choose from. IRIS Metrics, HitBox, WebTrends are three we’d recommend but there are now plenty of others on the market that allow you to follow what people are doing on your site.

Once you have a system then you can learn to test. For instance if you haven’t got any sales pages that are selling then you have an easy time of it. Any improvement is good. So take the worst page (the one with the highest bounce rate) and change maybe the headline to imply a unique customer benefit. Measure this. If bounce improves keep it. If it gets worse change it again until it gets better.

Some variables you might want to test;

- Headlines. (We improved bounce by 36% on one page with a better headline).

- Scan Proofing (Bold benefits so that the reader gets the point without having to read – 33% improvement in bounce).

- Bullet point benefits versus long copy. On one site last year we actually improved sales from nearly zero conversion to 2.4% sales conversion on a landing page by changing long copy to bulleted psychological benefits.

- Testimonials and other social evidence. Add these to pages where you can, we increased conversion of one lead generation system to 1.5% overall from nothing simply by adding client testimonials to a page with the registration form on it.

- Calls to action. It sounds stupid but if you don’t have a way to capture the sale or the lead then really please don’t expect to be inundated with phone calls. It doesn’t work like that. Put calls to action in different places and test which method works best.

- Graphics. Test how to use them. All communication should lead to change and graphics are no exception, use them to persuade, inform, brand or intrude. Don’t use them for the sake of using them.

3) Target your market

If you’re going to optimize for search engines make sure you get the target market right by selecting the right keywords to optimize for. Basically you want the highest levels of traffic you can attain which also converts highly. PPC traffic, or other traffic you have to pay for should be negatively targeted with factors like price and location for big ticket items. You don’t want to pay thousands for people only mildly interested, you want to pay hundreds for the few who have their wallets open.

Think about the market you have, what makes them tick? What is it about the product that they want? What about the extras and bonus benefits you can offer? Are you telling them everything? Remember above all else that different people have different wants and needs. One of our customers sells amongst other things nebulizers (an asthmatic product). A young mother with children might be closed to the sale by being told the fact that the nebulizer fits in her purse so it’s convenient for her, whereas a guy whose old nebulizer just broke might need a new one shipped pretty quickly so shipping time is more important to him. What you have to do is tell your audience all of these needs are catered for so that you have optimum chance of a sale. Tell your audience the whole story.

The good thing about search marketing is that it’s all possible to measure, so you can see where exactly people have arrived from. It makes it easy for you to concentrate your best time and effort on what works and forget about what doesn’t and it’s a cheaper form of marketing than say sticking an ad in the news paper.

Summary

Had the CEO looked through his web analytics package (or paid someone else to do it) he might have found that his bounce rates were very high on his product pages. He might have seen that the traffic directed to his offers were largely from the wrong kind of target audience. He might have realized that his content and copy was poorly organized and that his information architecture needed improvement. He might have figured out that by changing the size of a graphic on a page he could better influence the outcome of a call to action.

Improving web site sales happens with lots of testing, time and patience, but eventually it comes. It’s about learning how to sell to your online target audience by testing and optimizing pages through observation. Once you have learned the basics of doing this it becomes easy to continue your testing so that you continuously improve. Forever and ever!

Steve Jackson is CEO of Aboavista, editor of The Conversion Chronicles and a published writer. You can get a free copy of his e-book sent to you upon subscription to the Chronicles web site (http://www.conversionchronicles.com).

Like most average persons, I wanted some extra money to supplement my regular income. I had considered a part time second job at times, but hated that option because it would take me away from the family, make me more tired and probably just pay minimum wage. I also wanted to be able to work from home.

I had surfed the internet for years and had often considered the idea of participating in the internet revolution. I had read some statistics on the use of internet and the increasing numbers of homes with computers and the increasing percentage of Christmas shopping done over the internet. So I decided to jump in with both feet.

First what is ecommerce? The online world designates web sites devoted to retail sales as an e-commerce site. E-commerce sites sell either information or hard goods such as cameras or knifes. E-commerce sites also have Shopping Carts and Payment Gateways attached to them that non-sales web sites do not need.

Ok……so you want to develop an E-commerce site. You are now probably asking do I have enough skill, mental patience or aptitude to be successful?

Well if you have average intelligence, I believe that you and thousands of people just like you could have an E-commerce web site. All that is required is the willingness to learn a few things, patience, and the determination to apply yourself.

How? I am glad you asked.

Let’s begin. We first need to discuss the basics components you will need.

1. Computer
2. Internet connection
3. Site building software
4. Graphics Software
5. Web hosting company
6. Shopping cart
7. Payment gateway

The above elements are where most people stop when they think of what they will need when they want to start an ecommerce site. However, there are other elements that need to be considered, such as getting legal and product sourcing.

Items 1 and 2 above are pretty straight forward and most people can understand why they are necessary. The other items however are a little more complex. Site building software allows the beginner to construct a web site without knowing html programming code. What is Html programming Code?

Html is the programming language of the internet and stands for Hyper Text Mark Up Language. The two best software programs currently available to write Html are Microsoft’s FrontPage 2003 or Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. These programs are more correctly known as HTML Editors.

These two programs are the best ones available. I have them both but use FrontPage 2003 primarily. I think FrontPage 2003 is easier to use and does better tables then Dreamweaver. Most professional web site developers, however consider Dreamweaver the better of the two because some claim it has more features, but I find it is a little more complicated to use. I would recommend that you surf the internet and read the reviews on both of these programs and make you own choice.

Next you will need a good graphic program such as Adobe Photoshop 6. A graphics program allows you manipulate the size of images create images in different formats and create special effects. “PhotoShop 6” is the current version from Adobe and is the best software program for graphics. Adobe
“Photoshop Elements” can also be used, but is a limited version of the full Photoshop software. The programs from Adobe are expensive so shop around for the best price.

Web hosting is very important and you need to comparison shop for features first, not on price. Web hosting and ecommerce are extremely related, and learned by personal experience the mistake trying to separate ecommerce from web hosting. The web host company is the company that rents room on their server for your web site, but they can much more. They can offer an integrated shopping cart.

The shopping cart is the heart of the ecommerce web site. The shopping cart for all intents and purposes runs your ecommerce web site so it is critical to get a good one. It contains and displays the products you intend to sell. It also does other neat administrative functions that will make your store easier to run. There are some stand alone shopping carts for sale but most come with web hosting service attached.

The "Payment Gateway" is the cashier in the store and is also known as a "Merchant Account." This is basically a business credit card account. The payment gateway allows your se store to accept credit cards and transfer money to you. Merchant Accounts are very important and you should also carefully review their services and prices. If you do not get a merchant account you are pretty much limited to papal. Search the web and check out the available shopping carts and payment gateways.

Now what are you going to sell, and where are you going to get it? You can look every where for the products you want to sell. How do you know what will sell well? You need to do some market research. Not everything sells well, including electronics. If you have no preference on what to sell, find some marketing software that will allow you to determine which products ell well online.

Next, you will need a source for those products. Assuming you are not making them yourself. The best way is to drop ship them. The trouble is finding a reliable drop ship source and avoiding the imposters.

Once you find you product source you need to open an account and stock your store and start selling. There munch more to an ecommerce store then can be explained in a brief article format. As someone who recently went from zero to an online store Cynscorion.com), I know first hand of the pit falls that await the beginning ecommerce site builder.

If you want to learn more about what to avoid in building an ecommerce site go to either: www.cynscorion.com and go to the bottom of the page and click on "Ecommerce Book For Beginners" ,or go to: http://cynscorion.com/store/cart.php?page=what_yofuture_release_of_a_very_unique_ecommerce_book
This book is for people undecided on whether to start an ecommerce site and want to find one point of reference to assist them in making their decision.

Lastly, I wish you good luck and success in your ecommerce endeavors. If I can do it, so can you!

For additional assistance go to:

http://people.lulu.com/users/index.php?fHomepage=101573

The author created his own ecommerce web site going from knowing nothing to having a fully functional ecommerce site on the web, and wrote a book on the experience. The aptly titled "STEP 1: E-commerce for Beginners" explains to BEGINNERS what "STEP 1" is, and what they should be prepared for and makes recommedations to make the experience of building the 1st web site less stressful.

From early days of www, the Internet sites that are added day by day are increasing tremendously. When you will consider this pool of web, may be they are about computers, industry, entertainment, search engines, fashion, organizational or even individual, all of these sites are concerned about one major part of web development apart from the logic or programming efforts behind it is ‘User Interface Design’.

Any web site will gain your interest by its appearance in front of you as well as ease of using and understanding the contents in that particular page. Therefore many of the web developers out there are always trying to go for the best user interface design which must also be affordable, can be either done by the developer firm or by web developer individual himself or he have to outsource the site for user interface creation.

The main stages in the creation of the user interface can be roughly listed as follows:

1. Note down all the aspects of your web site,

2. Try to list items as per their priority on the web page as well as consider their categorization.

3. From this list highlight points that are required to be catchy (e.g. in most of the general web site the Chat / Mail / News are considered to be the most catchy points whereas on the online shopping site the special offers and hot selling items may be the most catchy points).

4. Then decide the color combination of your interface (As per my point of view this is the most crucial part which many of them out there do not take into consideration which results in to a web site which is nothing but a site full of color in fact site looking like a circus! (You can understand what I want to say). So if you are rally very careful about the richness of the user interface then you should not fail to consider this point.

5. Once you have decided the color combination you have already won half the battle. Now you have to draw a picture of how your web page will look like finally, where on the web page I will place the catchy points I have listed previously, what will be common between the web pages (A date and time may be there from home page to the last page of your web site).

6. Finalize placing of all the remaining points in the list prepared by you.

7. If required repeat the steps for all the succeeding pages in your web site.

8. Then and only then go for designing of the web pages using various tools.

You may take help of various image-editing softwares like Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, even normal paintbrush for giving effect to the various images, backgrounds used in the page design. You can also embody various animations in your web page to give it a nice touch. You can try Macromedia Flash, GIF Animator or Animationshop for the same.

Some important tips-n-tricks of making your web page look catchier than ever will be discussed in my next articles.

Remember more effective and easier user interface - more the number of visitor (or even customer) who will specially halt at your site to check it out.

Nikhil R. Salvi
B.E.Computer Engg.
India

Does My Web Site Require A Web Database?

If your web site require constant updates and feeding of information, a web database is the solution. In short, this applies to web sites that handle online products, news feed, members- based subscription and other functions as well. Not only can a database provide easier access to information, it also automates most of your daily tasks. For example, running an book store requires massive amount of efforts in inventory and updating. However, if you have a database to play around with, you can actually hook up your online book store with your existing brick-and-mortar shop. Get a couple of scanning equipment and PC, updating your online book store can never be easier than scanning the barcodes!

Building Your Own Database

Sure, you can make your own web database if you know a little about programming. It is mostly hard work with tons of programming to do and not difficult as long as you have an adequate level of programming background. One thing to note is: your database requires robust database security measures to be set up. For those who are determined to give it a shot, there are many online forums that offer helpful tips and support in database building.

Choosing Your Database Language

There are many web database languages to choose from for your web site- SQL server, Access and MySql are the more popular ones. Each web language has its own strengths and limitations.

A popular choice of database language is MySql which is also an open source language.

Boey works in an Australian Internet Marketing and Web Design company (http://www.definiteweb.com/). His life revolves around web sites; providing full-time seo and web services to US and Australian businesses. Email: madmonk111@yahoo.com

When visitors add your web site to their Favorites or bookmark your site, what shows up in their list of sites? There are at least two things you can do to make sure your site stands out on anyone's list of Favorites, including a great idea that very few sites use. If you have a webmaster, he or she should be able to make these changes quickly, and those who maintain their own sites can easily handle these simple tasks.

First, make sure each page of your site has a good title. When you view your site in Internet Explorer or Netscape, what shows up at the very top of the screen? If it says "Home Page" or, even worse, "Untitled," that is what visitors will see when they include your site in their Favorites. Use "title" tags and add a title that describes the page.

And here's the thing very few sites do: Add a favicon file so that next to your site title in the Favorites list (and in the address bar when they go to your site) your logo appears instead of the ubiquitous Internet Explorer logo. (In Netscape, your logo will only appear in the address bar. The Netscape bookmark icon will be next to your site name in the bookmark file.) This is easy and quick and adds a real professional touch to your site. To see what I mean, take a look at my site. Go to http://www.IdeaLady.com/ and click on "Bookmark this page." (Netscape users, press Ctrl + D.) Then, open your favorites file and click on the IdeaLady link. You should see my lightbulb logo next to the title in your Favorites list (in IE) and next to the URL in the Address Bar (Netscape and IE).

For a good how-to article about creating your own favicon, go to http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/favicon.html. There is software called Irfanview that can easily create the favicon.ico file for you. Download it free (commercial users are asked to send $10) at http://www.irfanview.com/ It is easy to use, and can be used for a variety of graphics functions, in addition to creating your favicon.ico file.

Make your site stand out from the rest!

Copyright Cathy Stucker. As the Idea Lady, Cathy Stucker can help you attract customers and make yourself famous with inexpensive and free marketing ideas. Get free tips, articles and more at http://www.IdeaLady.com/.

The Disability Discrimination Act says that websites must be made accessible to disabled people. So how can you check that your website is up to par? There are a number of basic tests you can make to address some of the main issues that provide a good start in increasing accessibility to your site visitors:

1. Check informational images for alternative text

Place the cursor over an informational image, for example, the organisation logo. Does a yellow box appear with a brief, accurate description of the image? For users whose browsers do not support images, this alternative text is what they will see (or hear) in place of the image.

2. Check decorative images for alternative text

Place the cursor over a decorative image that does not have any function other than to look nice. Does a yellow box appear with a description of the image? It should not. There is no reason for users whose browsers do not support images to know that this image is there, as it serves no purpose.

Be careful though as this is not a foolproof test. If a yellow box does not appear, this could mean one of two things:

- The alternative text of the image is assigned a null value, which means that it will be ignored by browsers that do not support images. This is the ideal scenario.

- The alternative text of the image is simply not set at all, which means that users whose browsers do not support images will be alerted to its existence but will be unable to find out what purpose it carries – something which is very frustrating! This is certainly not the desired outcome.

3. ‘Listen’ to any video or audio content with the volume turned off

If you turn your speakers off, you are clearly unable to listen to, or follow, any audio content. This situation is faced by a deaf person on a daily basis. Ensure your website supplies written transcripts, so that deaf people can understand the message that your website is conveying.

4. Check that forms are accessible

Usually there is prompt text next to each item in a form. For example, a contact form might have the prompt text ‘name’, ‘e-mail’, and ‘comments’, each one next to a box where your site users will enter the information. When you click on the prompt text, does a flashing cursor appear in the box next to that text? If not, your forms are inaccessible.

5. Check that text can be resized

In Internet Explorer (used by over 90% of Internet users) go to View > Font size > Largest. Does the text on your website increase in size? If not, then your website is inaccessible to web users with poor visibility.

6. Check your website in the Lynx browser

The Lynx browser is a text-only browser and does not support many of the features that other browsers such as Internet Explorer have. You can check how your site looks in this browser with the Lynx Viewer, available at http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html. If your website makes sense and can be navigated through the Lynx browser, then it will be fulfilling many of the web accessibility guidelines.

7. Check that you can access all areas of your website without the use of a mouse

Can you navigate through your website using just tab, shift-tab and return? If not, then neither can keyboard- and voice-only users.

8. Check that there is a site map

Can you find a site map? If not, then neither can people who are lost on your website.

9. Ensure link text makes sense out of context

Blind Internet users often browse websites by tabbing from one link to the next. Does all the link text on your website make sense out of context? ‘Click here’ and ‘more’ are two common examples of non-descriptive link text.

10. Check your web pages with an automated program

Two programs available for free on the Internet are Bobby ( http://bobby.watchfire.com ) and Wave ( http://www.wave.webaim.org ). They are unable to provide you with all the information that you need, as some checks must be done by humans, but they can tell you some of the areas where your site might be going wrong.

This article was written by Trenton Moss. He's crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy ( Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk ) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.

Optimal website design is the art of logical navigation.

It will offer consistency while providing useful, quality information that is attractive to the eye and easy to understand. A well designed site will lead your viewers to the starting point and direct them through your site without confusing them.

While there are many ways to design a website there are a few basic design principles that will help you create a site that is user friendly and attractive.

1. Use lots of white space.

Don't feel that because you have a whole screen you need to fill it up with 'stuff'. Your page should follow a clean outline. Include your site name at the very top. Below that, list the subject of your page followed by information on your topic. Leave adequate space between each section.

Don't cram a lot of pictures and ads on your site. If you have an ad, keep it off to the side or subtly intersperse it between your text. The idea is not to overwhelm your reader with a lot of advertisements.

It's best to keep your text on a white background. If you do choose a colored background be careful that your text doesn't blend into the background making it difficult to read.

2. Don't use animation and flashing objects.

As advertisers we feel the need to get our viewers attention. This is important but we need to do it gracefully. Flashing objects and scrolling images distract your visitors and take away from the content. If your product is better demonstrated with animation, music or some other multi-media, allow your viewer to select the option. Don't force it on them.

3. Include an 'about' link.

Allow your viewers to find out about who you are and what you are about. Include a biography and some background on why you are in the business you're in or why you created your website. By helping them to get to know you, they will find it easier to develop a trust. If they can like you and trust you, they will feel a lot better about doing business with you.

Always include your business address, phone number and email address. This also lets viewers know that you welcome contact and are serious about your business.

4. Include a 'Privacy' Link

Reassure your visitors that you follow privacy guidelines by including a 'Privacy' page. This is particularly important if you are collecting names and email addresses. Visitors want to know that you will not sell or give away their information.

In these days of rampant spam, your privacy policy needs to be prominently displayed. Many viewers and business partners won't do business with you unless you have it.

5. Always keep your links in blue.

Internet surfers have long been accustomed to seeing links in blue. It's simply an expectation that viewers have. There's certainly no law that says your links must be blue, but people prefer consistency, therefore it's good practice to keep your links consistent and recognizable. If they're not, you may lose out on clicks.

6. Keep navigation consistent

The navigation scheme you create on your index page should be done the same way throughout your site. Don't force your viewers to relearn each page of your site. Keep your navigation bars, colors and fonts consistent for each page.

7. Use Understandable buttons and links.

Title your links appropriately. Don't use cute or misleading names. For example, if you have a link to 'cameras' don't label the link 'hotshots', label it 'Cameras'. Your viewers don't want to waste time figuring out what things are. Be clear with your text or you could risk losing your visitor.

8. Focus on the 'YOU', not the 'ME'.

Make it obviously clear to your readers that you are in business for them. Encourage feedback, provide useful information and keep advertisements to a minimum. Your objective should be focused on what you can do for your reader? Convince them that your main interest is how you can deliver what it is they're looking for?

9. Make sure your page loads fast.

If viewers have to wait for a page to load they will click elsewhere. If a page doesn't load in 8 seconds you could lose 1/3 of your visitors. Here's a great free tool to help you check your website's load time:

http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.loading-time-checker.htm

10. Use a site map.

A site map will give visitors a "guide" on viewing your site, especially with larger sites. it's a road map for your visitors to follow. Sitemaps are also popular with search engines and are often recommended to help ensure indexing.

About the Author

Elizabeth McGee has spent 20 years in the service and support industry. She has moved her expertise to the world wide web helping businesses find trusted tools, enhance customer service, build confidence and increase sales. You can contact Elizabeth at mail@pro-marketing-online.com or visit her website at http://www.pro-marketing-online.com

Copyright © 2004 Adlite Enterprises http://www.pro-marketing-online.com

"Build it and they will come."
--Filed of Dreams (1989)

If you are working on an Internet business, you may read a lot of information for how quickly you can make money online. The truth is that running online business is same as running traditional business. You need spend time to learn, to build your business. There is no "magic button" you can push and get quick money. But Internet business has larger potential compare to traditional business since you have global customers. If you follow right roadmaps, you can be very successfull.

Here are a few suggestions for your reference:

If something promised fast and easy results, if all you have to do is copy-and-paste something...don't bother.

Why?

Because, even if it works well at first (and usually it won't), it will stop delivering results very soon.

They may deliver some traffic at first. If people started seeing it so often, and started feeling so manipulated, that the response rate soon dropped to near-zero.

And FFAs were easy to do, and that everyone started doing them, and the funny thing is that everyone stopped reading the messages. Just imagine, if you got over 500 emails a day in your inbox, will you read them through? If you inbox is full and cannot send anymore messages out, what will you do for the old emails? "DELETE" them, right? So if you send advertising through
FFA pages, can you imagine what your advertising ends at? Maybe at the someone else's junk mail folder or "trash can".

So what works?

Techniques that take some time and creativity.

The question in your mind is how to realize your dream?

The good news is that you can find good tools at cheap price - it is easy for you to work with as long as you have "Motivation". It is called Sitebuilder.

Motivation plus SiteBuilder will seperate you from those who fail on the net.

At beginning, you may need spend 10 days for extensive reading (over 600 pages) and learning the tools and knowledges for how to build a site that gets clicks, it is worthwhile in the long term.

A lot of people tends to build a site within 24 hours, then spend the rest of his life and money to promote it -- then quit if do not see results.

If you have time to promote your site without knowing whether you are on the right track, it is strongly suggest that you'd better spend your valuable time to learn the tools that work and get life time "free" traffic. You can get free valuable traffic from search engine, and get clicks-- get sales.

In millionair Mike Litman's CD, he said "successfull people is doing something he does not like to do" - If you feel that you do not want to spend time to build a good theme based websites by researching good contents and deliver good information or products, actually that's exactly what you should do - then you will be belong to the successfull people for your online business.

If you are looking for more information of how to make your site sell, how to build a good website or revise your website to get free traffic, you can visit http://www.best-internet-businesses.com and get 10 days roadmaps (over 600 pages of free ebooks) for your online success. It may be your turn point for your entire Internet business.

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Julia Tang publishes Smart Online Business Tips, a fresh
and informative newsletter dedicated to supporting people
like you! To find out the best online business opportunities,
and to discover hundreds more proven and practical internet
marketing secrets, plus FREE internet marketing products
worth over $200, visit: http://www.best-internet-businesses.com
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Note: Feel free to publish it with the resource box and content unchanged

In the time that I have been using the Internet, (since 1996) I have seen a lot of websites. I have seen a lot of good websites and I have seen a lot that were just plain awful. Here are some things to think about before you start a website.

What is the purpose of your website? Is it meant to be primarily a sales site or is it meant to be purely informative?

Once you have decided on your website's purpose, you need to decide on a theme. There is nothing worse than going to a website and having to play guess what this website is about. To pick a theme, I suggest that you write down a list of things that you are interested in and/or knowledgeable about.

Once you have written your list down, you need to do some research. Use a tool such as the search term suggestion tool on overture to see if there is a demand for your topic. If you type in your topic and see a lot of searches done for your topic then you should use that topic. If you don't see a lot of searches done for your particular topic, try another one.

Now that you have picked a topic that is in high demand, you need to either develop a product that fits the theme of your site or find a product to sell that fits within the theme of your site.

You also need some sort of freebie to offer on your site so that you can build your own opt-in list for marketing purposes. You should offer an ebook or a special report. Maybe even offer an e-course. Whatever you offer, make sure that you have a way of capturing the email addresses of your visitors. These people will become your "warm market" or people that you can market your other offers to.

You will need to find a hosting company to host your site. Free Web space is fine for just casual websites, but if you are serious about making money online you should eventually graduate to a paid host. The reason behind this is that many people perceive a site hosted on a free web space to be unprofessional. I don't agree with these people myself, but you do have to deal with what the majority thinks in this industry.

You also need your own domain name. See the above tip.

You will need to code your site. You can either learn how to do this yourself or you can hire someone to do it for you. The amount of money you have to spend on this endeavor should help you to decide whether or not you want to hire someone.

Lastly, you need to figure out how you are going to promote your site. Here are some suggestions:
writing free articles for reprint in ezines and on websites.
buying advertising in ezines
buying advertising on websites
trading links with relevant sites.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of things to think about when starting a website. This article's purpose is just to get you started. You should certainly read everything you can find about doing business online while you are building your business.

Copyright 2004 by DeAnna Spencer
This article may be reproduced and redistributed freely on the Internet as long as the resource box remains intact.

DeAnna Spencer is a virtual assistant that helps entrepreneurs run a successful business by providing affordable administrative help. She also publishes a blog for small business owners. Visit this http://learnsmallbusiness.wordpress.com/ resource today.

What is the most important part of your online business?

Many people would say: "my website". And that’s understandable – it’s the most visible part of an internet business.

But the real power in your online business is email. It’s the ability to reach your database of contacts at the click of a button. The efficiency of your email pipeline will determine how much money your business makes.

Your website is just a way of building your mailing list - by collecting the email addresses of your visitors.

In fact, we’re not talking about one list, but several. Here are the lists that I maintain – they’re all people who at one time or another have visited my websites:

- people who have bought my products
- people who have signed up to receive my articles
- people who have joined my affiliate program
- people who have signed up for my email course
- people who have joined my newsletter

So why are these lists so important?

Because most of your visitors won't buy on the first contact. Statistics show that most people will need to see your message 7 times before they make a purchase. So if you're not collecting the email addresses of your visitors, you are losing out on a lot of sales.

But there is one list in particular that is like gold. It's your list of previous customers. These people are predisposed to buying from you. In fact, some businesses make 80% of their sales from previous customers.

All well and good - but what do I do with these lists?

Here are some ideas:

- announce your latest product to your customer list

- announce your latest product to your affiliates list

- send your latest article to your articles list

- announce your latest product in your newsletter

- publish your latest article in your newsletter

- announce 'related' products to your customer list

- send your latest article to your affiliates list so they can use

it to promote your products

For each list that you manage you will need (1) an autoresponder account or an autoresponder script and (2) a way of capturing your visitor's email address.

(1) Autoresponder Accounts

An autoresponder account gives you the ability to manage a list without installing software - it's all done on a remote website. Most autoresponder accounts will give you:

- an email address for subscribing
- an HTML form for subscribing
- seven or more follow-up messages
- a confirmation email to you every time someone joins
- the ability to broadcast messages to your list
- the ability to personalize your messages
- database of your prospects
- online stats

Here are some sites that offer autoresponder accounts:

http://www.aweber.com/

http://www.getresponse.com/

http://www.responders.com/

http://www.proautoresponder.com/

http://www.www.roibot.com/

http://www.infogeneratorpro.com/

http://www.replypro.net/

http://www.auto-responder.co.uk/

Now, autoresponder accounts cost between $17 and $20 per month. And with most autoresponder services you can only manage one list per account. So if you are managing 5 lists, that quickly adds up to a hefty monthly bill.

But there are a few services that allow you to manage multiple lists with one account. Here are some of them:

http://www.rapidreply.net/
http://www.ezmailpro.com/
http://www.autorespond-it.com/
http://www.1automationwiz.com/
http://www.royal-responder.com/

(2) Capturing Email Addresses

The most popular way to get new subscribers to your list is a 'subscribe form' that pops up when your website loads. I get 25 to 30 new subscribers a day using this technique. The HTML code for the subscribe form usually comes with your autoresponder account.

Another way to invite visitors to join your list is an 'alert box'. An alert box is a small gray dialogue box that pops up when someone visits your website. It usually says something like: "Please subscribe to my Newsletter. 5 Free eBooks when you join". It's impossible to ignore an alert box - you have to either close it or click OK to continue.

Alert boxes have two advantages over subscribe forms. Firstly, there's no form to fill in, so it's much easier for people to join your list. People who have switched from a subscribe form to an alert box report 3 to 5 times as many subscribers.

Secondly, alert boxes capture only "real" email addresses - the email address from the visitor's client browser. You end up with very few Hotmail and Yahoo addresses, which means you'll have a much more responsive list. For more information about alert boxes, visit: http://www.optinlightning.com/

So to sum up, use your website to build several optin mailing lists and you'll have a private audience of people you can market to over and over again - it's the key to running a successful online business.

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Michael Southon has been writing for the Internet for over 3
years. He has shown hundreds of webmasters how to use this
simple technique to build a successful online business. Click
here to find out more: http://ezine-writer.com/
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In the late 1990’s three San Francisco based web developers came up with the idea of being able to share information about anything on the web. The terminology they used was called blog. It's use was considered a mix of web page / personal journal. It's original usages were vast and wide, but more and more people came to use them as a personal tool that is available anywhere the Internet is. The three friends would eventually create Blogger.com one of the largest blogger sites on the Internet today. Blogger, which stands for Web Logger, has increased in popularity over the past three years. There has been so much interest in what capabilities it holds Google.com purchased them. Eventually, Google assimilated their technologies and imported them into the popular plug-in, The Google Toolbar.

Blogger.com allows a user to create a userid. Depending on the userid and password the user creates a specialized link namely “yourlinkname.blogspot.com”. This space can be saved as a bookmark and published to the public or through a distribution list to a select few people. Your site is logged as a “webring” type of atmosphere, should you decide to take the information public. You can see all users who have published blogs and even enter in information on the blogs should they let you. Discussion groups and personal files are housed all within this environment making it a fun place to surf about and learn about different people and things.

You can create a private discussion group and send out information via email to let people know when content or a thread has changed. Blog is like a portal for individuals, instead of business. There are many robust features involved to keep your blog private should you not want to share information publicly. Its interface even includes a word processing editor so you can format the background and font all from one simple location. The ideas are simple; you can share information around the world without having to let everyone on the Internet community know your blog exists.

The necessity for a personal online portal or “blog” has considerable potential, as the Internet continues to evolve.

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.

No matter what browser you may want to use, you should consider using Google’s toolbar. Google.com, the innovative, stripped-down, add-free search engine that has taken the web by storm has provided an innovative interface through most web browsers; mainly Internet Explorer. This toolbar has many great features for searching around the Internet as well as blocking those annoying Pop-up ads that scream “BUY ME!” every twenty seconds.

Anyone can go to toolbar.google.com and download this great plug-in for your browser. There are various features that come with using it that you may or may not wish to employ. Taking a few minutes before you install it will definitely save you time later on.

Google Search Web
In this interface you can type in keywords, terms, phrases as well as URL’s (Universal Resource Locators) and away you go. By harnessing the Google engine you magically fly through their portal to your destination. You will render a Google search or a direct shot to your URL.

PageRank
With any good toolbar, Google let’s you know how important it thinks the site you are looking is. This rank is rated from 1 – 10, 1 being a very light, low-traveled website and ten which is a site like Google where millions of people visit each day. Your page rank is determined by several factors, keywords, keyword in URL, and reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking alone buys the user a popular rank as Google looks favorably at websites that share good karma. The larger the number of websites pointing to your site will ultimately help you rise up through the ranking status.

Pop-Up Blocker
You get them, we all get them, those nasty pop-up ads that ask you to lose weight or tell you how to increase your libido. These advertising snippets have become annoying to the point that some websites you cannot even get on because you can be barraged by a plethora of pop-up ads. The Pop-Up Blocker plug-in allows you to receive little if no pop-ups. Google designed this plug-in as an approach to invasion free web surfing. Every time a pop-up rears its ugly head, POW! Add another pop-up to the counter. It actually tells you how many pop-ups the toolbar has thwarted.

BlogThis!
An interesting technology that was designed in the late 1990’s and recently purchased by Google. Blog This! Allows the user to create a private or public diary or workspace to share ideas, search for people, create discussions and just jot down information. These blog’s have become infamous over the past few years and Google has purchased the leading company in the boom.

Autofill capabilities
You may have been looking up a specific keyword or term and found a result that you liked. The Autofill capabilities cache your searching information for present as well as future use should you need to call up previous search requests.

As you can the Google toolbar displays many great features and technologies that you can harness in a few short clicks. The technology involved has far surpassed any other search engine on the planet.

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com. Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.