SEO

Foremost important thing for selling is getting seen or heard. This rule applies for your business too. If people are looking for budget hotels on Internet, and your hotel is not listed, you have already lost the battle. Who will know about you and come to you if you are not getting seen or heard? So, start search engine optimization of your website. Use keywords effectively in your websites or blogs, and make sure you have a high ranking in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing etc.

Get listed in travel websites

People may not land up in your website or do a direct search; they may go to popular travel portals. So you need to tie up with all good travel portals. At the cost of some expense you can reap huge response from these sites. Online flight and hotel booking sites are to be considered as well. Not only people may get to know about you and contact you; but may also do online booking right from the travel portals. You may pay some commission to the intermediate site in between, but it is worth of money spent.

Some positive reviews can be helpful

Some positive reviews by past visitors can be extremely helpful for you. Your website may carry some real good reviews and these should look authentic and original. Paid reviews may not help you in the long run.

Tariff should be clear

There shouldn’t be any confusion regarding the hotel room tariff. State it clearly, by mentioning the kind of room you are offering. You may put pictures along with rates, for further understanding of the prospect. If you are offering off-seasonal discount, mention that.

Facebook fan page

A Facebook fan page will not only keep your past visitors connected to you and promote repetitive visit, but also draw lot of new people. Keep updating your fan page with latest happenings, events, offerings, rates etc.

What are waiting for? Get started with the online promotion.

It has never been easier to pursue building your own online business, but there are some common pitfalls you want to avoid to shorten your road to success.

1. Determine your products and market.
These days nearly every form of product and service is being sold online with the ability to reach millions of potential customers all over the world. Before you start your online business, you need to decide exactly what you would like to offer to consumers. Ideally, your choice should be mainly based on your own interests so that your heart is in the business even if sales are slow in the beginning. You should also check the market to ensure that there is a demand for the products or services you intend to offer.

2. Develop your unique selling point.
The key to a business distinguishing itself apart from its competition is to have a unique selling point. Your unique selling point concentrates on the uniqueness of your business and how you will help your customers. Consider what is special about your business, as well as the needs of your customers, in order to develop a quality unique selling point.

3. Build your marketing strategy.
Prior to contacting any ecommerce hosting company or purchasing shopping cart software, it’s vital that you ask yourself how you will promote your new business. Depending on your targeted audience of potential customers, you may want to focus on advertising online more than offline. Online marketing can prove to be highly effective even with a tight budget. You should also factor in future costs for search engine optimization to ensure your site ranks high.

4. Research available shipping methods.
If you are selling an actual product then you will need to decide on which shipping methods you will use to fulfill orders. It’s important to choose shipping methods that are fast and reliable, whether you are maintaining an actual stock onsite or you have chosen to drop ship with a manufacturer or wholesaler.

5. Pick your domain name.
Selecting the domain name for your business is one of the most critical decisions that you must make when selling online. There are different ways to approach choosing a domain name. If your company name is not too lengthy, then one idea is to use it as the domain name. Another strategy is to use a phrase consisting of one or more core products you intend to sell so that when consumers search for this item your website naturally has a better opportunity of ranking at the top organically. Regardless of which method you use to select your domain name, make sure that you purchase it with a .com domain extension. It’s also useful to buy other top level domain extensions, such as .net, .org, .info, and others, to prevent anyone from trying to steal or ruin your brand.

6. Decide on an ecommerce hosting company.
Once you’ve chosen your domain name, it’s now time to pick an ecommerce website hosting company to use for hosting your online business. You’ll want to shop around and look for genuine review websites to find a reliable host that offers ecommerce hosting plans. Compare between companies to make sure you’re getting the best deal out there. You want to make sure that the company you decide on is able to handle websites that run on ecommerce platforms.

7. Select the ecommerce software for your online business.
After choosing an ecommerce hosting company, you now need to determine which software you will use to power your online business. There are a multitude of ecommerce solutions available, both free and paid, and you should research online and ask others to help decide which software is best for your store.

8. Get a professional design for your website.
Although the ecommerce software you have decided to use may work just fine out of the box, it may be necessary to have a design made for it to increase your online store’s uniqueness and personality. Based on the software you are using, you will have the option to choose from ready-made themes or hire someone for a completely custom design.

9. Locate a payment processor.
Before you can actually process any orders you will need to sign up with a payment processor. This is a company appointed by a merchant to deal with credit card transactions. Payment processors verify payments and help prevent fraudulent transactions. You will need to compare between different companies and look closely at the various fees that can be hidden at times.

10. Provide remarkable customer service.
Once your online store is up and ready to accept payments, the final point to keep in mind is to guarantee that you provide outstanding customer service. If your customers have a terrible experience shopping at your store then you should never expect them to return as they can easily shop from your competition that is only a click away. Consider whether or not you can provide a customer service telephone number, or at least an email service that responds promptly.

These are ten things that you should remember when starting your own ecommerce business so that you can be on your way towards success without any regrets.

These web content writing tips could help you in coming up with a better website.

Unique content

First of all, produce good quality, original and correct content. Poor quality writing and grammatical errors get easily noticed. They destroy credibility of the site owner. Content should be 100% original. Don’t get tempted to copy from other attractive web contents. Copied content easily gets tracked by Google and other search engines. The content should be correct, valid and credible. You just can’t afford to fill up the space with wrong, misleading content. It should add some value to the reader’s mind.

Insert keywords

Insert keywords in your web content with great care. Keywords shouldn’t look misfit or irrelevant. Choose your keywords as per your target reader.

Clear, legible text

The text matter shouldn’t look blurred, distorted, cluttered. Font should be formal, easy to read and clear. Don’t fall for the super stylish calligraphic fonts. Use bullets, bold headings and sub points. They break the monotony.

Internal linking

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the latest craze. Post highest amount of links online which will direct traffic to your website. It will naturally increase your search engine ranking.

Simple vocabulary and short sentences

Short and crisp sentences keep the reader involved and interested. Keep the vocabulary simple yet rich, matching your target audience. People fail to read long sentences on the web and comprehend the meaning. They also lose attention. So keep sentences simple and short.

Following these few simple tips could actually make your web content appear great.

It all started small, but soon it became a force to reckon with, and then online marketing became “the thing” for business. Every new finding, new idea, new invention, and new way of doing things is significantly affecting the nature of online marketing. At present, a marketer uses the following tools to promote one’s business on the Internet.

Various tools of online marketing

• Text Ads
• Banner Ads
• E-mail marketing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Pay Per Click advertising (PPC)/ Cost Per Click advertising (CPC)
• Pay Per View advertising (PPV)
• Cost Per Action (CPA)
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Lead generation
  • Sponsored blog posts
  • Sponsored forum posts
  • Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking pages
  • Digg, StumbleUpon, Reditt, and other social bookmarking tools
  • Yahoo, Google, MySpace, and other groups
  • Blog directories
  • Website directories
  • Article marketing
  • Video marketing
  • Press release submission

As you can see, marketers are spoiled by choices, which at times are good, but most of the times are not. At least, I feel so. I believe in the school of thought that says too many choices cripple the decision. But at the same time if these tools are put judiciously to use, one can get amazing results. I have shown you both side of the story, the decision is yours which one to use and which not to. If you feel you can handle all then use all.

On an average, the total time spent in December 2009 by the global consumers was five hours, 35 minutes and five seconds, whereas in the same month in 2008, the total time spent was of three hours, three minutes and 54 seconds.

In the same period, the number of unique users to various social networking sites also increased from 242 million to 307.4 million, which is a 27% YoY growth. (See chart below).

What it means for marketer?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are important, but the evidence suggests that social media is even more important. One should take note of it. The rise in time spent suggests increased in engagement, which as we know creates an army of receptive audience. Therefore, marketers should use social media more profusely than they did every before.

The biggest part about being successful writing is pretty much just being diligent.  You have to work at any career, and writing on the internet is no different.  You can’t allow yourself to second guess your career choice, or give up when the assignments seem too few and far between.  Something has to break eventually, but if you give up, you’ll never get that opportunity.

Learn how to use keywords, and to write SEO.  Search Engine Optimization is the most important technique for any internet writer.  If you want your articles to garner attention, and be read by the mass public, you need them to get noticed on search engines.  Because sites like Google operate searches by using keyword recognition, you need to have your articles formatted properly, and with the correct sprinkling of keywords.

Make sure that you make friends within the industry as well.  Network, network, network so that you can connect to as many job providers and writers as possible.  These are the people that have and will know about the best jobs.  Getting connected to them will open up as many doors as possible, and really get your career moving.

As long as you work hard, and are diligent, you can succeed.  Just remember to keep at it, and don’t give up on writing.

So the best way to approach improving your PageRank, is simply by getting your website out there.  Network and exchange links with as many like minded sites and businesses as possible.  Try to search out sites with higher traffic volumes, and higher PageRanks, as these are the more likely to increase your individual PageRank.  The more quality websites that link back to yours, the better Google will view your site.  The importance of networking just can’t be overstated.  That’s your internet bread and butter, and the better networked you are, the better your website is going to perform.

Remember to use SEO (search engine optimization) for everything you write, as this helps with all things regarding Google.  Your PageRank is also more likely to be higher if you make effective use of SEO.  It will increase search engine success, and the popularity of your site.  Both of which you need to build your Google presence, and therefore your website’s overall presence.

But also remember that improving your Google PageRank isn’t as likely to increase traffic as SEO.  Just because your site has a higher PageRank, does not mean that you’re the most likely to pop up first with a given keyword.  The only way to make that work is SEO and linking to as many other popular websites as possible.  These will also build your PageRank, and should remain your focus for building website traffic.

Everything written above is important; rather very important, but what is more important than all these things, when writing for web, is SEO, or say keywords to be more precise. (If you need to know about what key word is, and how to find relevant keywords or how to sue them then you should read SEO Simplified: Basics of Keyword.)

More often than not, you will stumble across a client who will ask you to write a keyword rich article, or to write an article using the given keyword, but the keyword density should not exceed 5 percent of the word count. You may also be asked to write a keyword-rich title (headline), headings, sub-headings, and anchor texts, or the client can demand you to write different meta tags as well along with the article. The demand of a client doesn’t end here; some even asks to use keywords twice in the first paragraph, once towards the end of the article while maintaining a keyword density of 4 percent.

The point is, if you are writing for web, you cannot avoid SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You have to know what SEO is, and how to find and use keywords in your articles. This is, when writing for web, as important as a working knowledge of grammar. Some writing experts [so-called] may try to denounce the importance of SEO in writing for the web, by classifying this kind of writing under SEO writing heading, which according to them is just one form of writing for the web. Well, nothing can be as far from the truth as it is. Let me tell you, every kind of writing for the web is SEO writing. No matter what you write, if you want people to read it, you need to optimize it with relevant keywords.

I will suggest you to follow the succeeding link and familiarize yourself with SEO, if you already don’t know about it, by reading SEO Simplified: an Overview. This series is meant for beginners only, and an absolute one for that.

What is your view about the importance of keywords in online copywriting?

Of course if you aren’t paying attention to the news, nothing can probably save you. But if you are watching your balance sheet, reviewing spending, and accounts receivable, and looking for ways to cut unnecessary costs you’ve got part of the idea under consideration.

It’s probably also good time to cut back on advertising and marketing – NOT!

There is no better time than now to build a new website. It’s easy. It’s affordable. Carpe diem. Seize the day.

This depression won’t last forever and there is no better time to profit from it than now.

Your competition is dropping like flies. They can’t pay their bills. They are laying off talented employees and closing their doors. You can acquire their liquidated inventory for pennies on the dollar. Their customers already know you and are looking for someone reliable to do business with.

But how to get the word out without spending those dollars that are more precious than today ever?

Media and print are the expensive dinosaurs of yesteryear. They went the way of brick and mortar stores when the internet exploded into our lives.

It’s never been easier or more affordable to build a website. Gossimer offers 3 Website Builder packages rich with marketing features.

Email marketing, search engine optimization, e-commerce – these are all smart ways to drive new customers to the front door without spending the big bucks.

“But,” says the senior partner, “We can’t afford a programmer and all that expensive equipment.”

That’s when the light bulb goes off. He thinks of his grandson, the computer nut!

In days it’s all agreed to. Grandpa is paying for college anyhow. And grandson is helping with the business he will someday inherit by putting up the fresh new website with the “What You See Is What You Get Products” by Gossimer.

Innovative and creative ideas have kept them in business for the past 75.

And that’s how to keep the family business alive for the next 25!