Generating leads is a vital part of your business. This article will touch on 5 ways to generate leads in a cost effective, but highly efficient manner. The best leads are those which are very targeted and as such, we will talk about strategies which give your business the best chance of gaining the most benefits from your leads list – whether that is an online email list or an offline list of prospect leads.

1. Seminars You can conduct seminars offline as well as online using teleconferencing software. Throughout the seminar you can speak about your website, business, and list and even offer a special or bonus for seminar attendees who sign up to your list. Even better, have them sign up to your list before they attend the seminar.

2. Provide Free Reports Offering free downloadable reports on your website is an excellent incentive for people to sign up to your list. You can generate leads this way to the tune of hundreds per day if you receive a lot of website traffic. It is simple to create a free report in PDF format, but make sure it offers value and not just rehashed content.

3. PPC marketing Pay per click marketing is one of the most cost effective marketing forms – if you play your cards right. It can end up costing a lot per lead if you bid on the wrong keywords, so hiring a PPC expert is a must. The returns can be exceptional.

4. Word of Mouth People who are already on your list will spread the word if they like what they are receiving from you. You can also offer incentives for them to spread the word.

5. Join User Groups and Communities Most industries and niches will have offline and online communities, memberships, user groups, support groups and other destinations the people gather. These are fantastic places to generate leads, but you have to ease your way in and become a respected member first.

These 5 simple ways to generate leads will provide you with many opportunities to build your list of prospects. Online lead generation is fast becoming the most popular and effective way to build prospects. It is highly cost effective and provides unlimited opportunities to access leads in multiple countries as well as across a diverse range of markets, segments and demographics.

© JeffDedrick for Niches 2 Riches Marketing Blog, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: business, Business Building, business leads, Email Marketing, leads, make money online, niche traffic, niches, traffic generation

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is one of the key steps in creating, maintaining, and promoting a high-traffic website. Freeing you from spending thousands of dollars on advertising and promotion, SEO allows you to grow your traffic organically with the help of page rankings. What many web designers learn only after much experience, however, is the difference meta tags make in how your pages rank.

No aspect of SEO is more commonly overlooked than placing meta tags on every page. These tags, written into the code of your page where they are invisible to visitors, give search engines specific identifiers for the page. Some websites create their listings almost entirely on meta tags, yet many website owners fail to implement them to full effect.

There are two different kinds of meta tags that have a high impact on SEO. Take, for our first example, the META KEYWORDS tag. This meta tag enumerates keywords to spiders, informing them what the website is all about. If you visit www.nytimes.com and right click on the page, and then click on “View Source,” you will encounter a meta tag about half down the first page reading META KEYWORDS. This tag will show you a long list of keywords starting with “New York Times, international news, daily newspaper, people, regional news, national news?” and so on. This keyword list includes dozens of words that relate to the New York Times but also to newspapers in general.

Most search engines detect these keywords in content, too, but it can be helpful for you to include keywords that are especially low-density in text, such as odd spellings of names and places, related topics not specifically discussed on the page, and any other keywords you have trouble injecting into your content in a user-friendly way.

The second critical meta tag is the META DESCRIPTION tag. Search engines use this tag to display information about your site when in search results. Most search engines allow 160 characters in this meta tag. The META DESCRIPTION tag is also a place you may include keywords that boost your page rankings for targeted phrases.

There are also other meta tags, but these two are vital for SEO. It is important that you maximize your use of META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION tags by making sure you do not cram them with words unrelated to your content or use the same keywords too many total times on the same page. Putting in too many keywords will cause the search engines to penalize your pages as spam. Not using enough keywords is almost as bad.

Finally, be sure to use different meta tags on every page. You should target tags to the content included on that particular page. If you repeat meta tags through your site, you will not benefit from valuable differences in keywords on particular pages.

© JustinHarrison for Niches 2 Riches Marketing Blog, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Affiliate Marketing, business, computers, ecommerce, entrepreneur, internet, internet marketing, internet;business, marketing, Niche Marketing, niche traffic, seo, traffic generation, web development, website;promotion

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

True marketing is a science. Numbers are constantly analyzed and several different techniques are conducted and tested to make sure the campaign will stay effective and maximize profits. For some reason, people think it’s different for online marketing.

Online marketers are much more drawn to copy other online success stories instead of running online marketing tests, like split testing. Split testing is a way marketers can closely compare to similar ads and discover which one draws more impressions.

Split testing is a way to bring the science back into marketing, because the truth about marketing is that what worked for one person may not work as well for this new marketing campaign.

Split testing will compare and contrast two ads with subtle differences, ranging from a new font, color, or phrase. After a few days, the marketing company will compare the two ads and see which one drew more attention. Another change is made to that ad and once again they are tested.

The technique in theory, ensures that the marketer will not just assume it’s a good campaign but instead know it’s a great campaign.

Imagine that you read about how to create the best sales page written by a man that has made millions as an affiliate to a specific eBook. He explains exactly how to write up your sales page, you follow his instructions to the letter, and firmly believe you will pull in the profits he received.

Different products have different audiences, and what was successful to one may not be successful to another. Your product may have been a step-by-step guide to an online video game, and the product marketed by the expert was a relationship guide for Christian grandparents. These two topics are obviously completely different. Do you think they generate the same exact audience?

The same holds true for marketing. The audience needs to be addressed, which means you must address and meet their needs. Tailor ads that fit your audience’s demographic.

Split testing is very important in the online marketing world, because it breaks down such a large audience and demographic to fit the needs of your product or service. Even though the World Wide Web expands everywhere, the audience is always more defined when it relates to a certain product or service.

Split testing is not just some optional way of seeing if you can improve your conversions. No, instead it’s one of the more viable and accurate ways to test out your ads as well as compare and contrast.

© GrahamMcKenzie for Niches 2 Riches Marketing Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Affiliate Marketing, analytics, Business Building, conversion optimisation, internet marketing, internet;business, Niche Marketing, niche traffic, niches, split testing, traffic generation, web development, webmaster

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

When you are starting a new blog, there are several things that you need to plan from the outset. What will your blog be called? What kinds of topics will it cover? How often do you intend to post? What will your writing style be? The rest of this article will look at those aspects in more detail.

What To Call Your Blog

When writing a blog, the first question you need to consider is whether the blog is primarily centered around your own writing or a specific topic. Many bloggers name their blogs after themselves such as ‘Betty Boop’ and others will name their blog based on the topic such as ‘Cat Grooming World’.

If you are branding yourself with the intention of marketing your personal services then naming your blog after yourself is a great move as you will always be able to use it to promote you. This is especially useful if you’re not sure what direction your blog will move in over time. But if you are building a blog around a specific topic which may not be part of you long-term then you may be better off with a niche-related name and domain.

Deciding Upon Topics For Your Blog

Some people find that their first blog starts out as a bit of a broad mish-mash of anything and everything they can think of and as such it ends up covering a large number of possibly unrelated topics. This is not really a good idea as most readers will only want to read a handful of your posts.

By clearly defining the topics you intend to blog about at the outset you can organise your posts into categories which will make your blog more organised and it will also be easier for new visitors to find what they are looking for.

Coming Up With a Blog Posting Schedule

A common trend amongst new bloggers is to start out bursting with enthusiasm. Indeed, much of the advice around tells you to blog as much as you can – at least every day if possible. Whilst more posts do in theory give you more chances to be found in the search engines, there are many readers who suffer from information overload and simply cannot keep up with busy blogs which leaves many of your posts unread.

In my experience it doesn’t really matter how often you post or on what days of the week etc. The most important factor is that whatever schedule you set for yourself, you try to stick to it and remain consistent. There are very successful bloggers that only post once per week and their readers look forward to reading their weekly post.

Another danger with trying to post too much, especially in the beginning, is that you may not be able to maintain your pace. You may run out of ideas, find the time committment to be too much or simply burn out and if you start posting less and less, this looks bad and it looks as though the blog is dying. Many readers will unsubscribe when this begins to happen.

A much better idea is to start off with a gentle posting schedule (you wont have many readers at the start anyway) and if you feel that you want to do more, to increase it slowly over time. Don’t do it the other way around!

Do You Have a Particular Writing Style?

I have often read advice that suggests that you should establish who your target audience is (this is good) and then alter your writing style to fit and that part is not so good. People will read your blog for its content and if you try to write in a style that is not comfortable for you it will show. Your blog is a reflection if you, your thoughts, opinions and passions and so on. Let the real you shine!

As for the style of the content itself, again this is highly personal. Each of us is different and you should write in your own style and not how you think your readers want you to write. Some people like to use humor, others prefer to stick to dry facts, some people like to rustle up some controversy and so on. Do what works for you.

Similarly, I see people asking questions such as, how long should my posts be? This again is down to personal style though it is perhaps influenced by your posting frequency. Short, snappy posts may be best if you post very often but if you only post once per week you’ll probably want to publish something with a bit more substance!

One thing to remember is that you can’t please all of the people all of the time anyway so trying to modify your posting style to fit in with some idea of what your readers might like is an exercise in futility. At the end of the day some people will like your style and some won’t. Those that do will hopefully subscribe and those that don’t will not but that’s just life and nothing to worry about!

© CarolineMiddlebrook for Niches 2 Riches Marketing Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, Blog Marketing, blogging, blogs, business, earn money blogging, home based business, internet marketing, make money blogging, make money online, niche blogs, planning, strategy

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Logging into Google AdWords, you will quickly find a large number of very useful tools at your disposal. These tools will make it possible to proof your ads for errors, choose their placement, optimize your website, and generate a huge number of reports so you can see how your ads are performing against other sites, in their demographics, and much more. But probably the most powerful tool you will find is the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool, which uses ad data to generate a list of related keywords along with their recent search data and their cost.

To begin, you should generate your own list of some basic keywords. This list of no more than 15 words will give AdWords the data to generate new words and phrases for you. You can either find these keywords directly on your web pages, and Google can do that for you automatically, or you can brainstorm you own list based on what you think your most profitable visitors would search for if they wanted what your website provides.

Either way, the next step is for you to take your list to the keyword suggestion tool. Start by entering your keywords one at a time. It is possible to enter multiple keywords all at once, but if you do this, it’s highly likely you will get back a list of hundreds of keywords that don’t really related to your site. It is far more effective just to start with one keyword at a time, letting the Adwords keyword suggestion tool generate related terms that you may be able to use.

Whenever you enter a word or phrase into the keyword suggestion tool, it will come back with other keywords or phrases that match websites with similar content. It will also find keywords and phrases from the Adwords campaigns of other site owners who bid on some of the same words you chose. The suggestion tool estimates traffic per month, tells you how much competition there is for the word or term, and gives you current prices for placement at various levels of the page.

Moreover, Adwords gives you dozens more options that will tell you even more about your keywords. You can generate monthly traffic charts, telling you how the popularity of your keywords goes up and down throughout the year. You can get an estimate of the position of your ad on the page at various prices, and you can get an estimate of the number of clicks you can buy based on last month’s search volume, average search volume, and which month the search volume for that keyword is the highest.

Every one of these bits of information is important as you choose your keywords, but it is still up to you to select search terms that you know match your content. Don’t throw your money away on a low competition, high volume, cheap keyword that won’t bring you any visitors who will appreciate your site and buy your products. But be assured that if you do diligent research and stay creative, every keyword you choose for your Adwords campaign will drive traffic to your site.

© JustinHarrison for Niches 2 Riches Marketing Blog, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: adwords, Affiliate Marketing, business, ecommerce, entrepreneur, internet, internet marketing, internet;business, keywords, marketing, niche advertising, Niche Marketing, niches, seo, traffic generation, web development, website;promotion

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Unique Article Wizard (UAW) is an internet-based service which allows you to get a lot of exposure for your website. The “article” part of the name is pretty self-explanatory – but what does the “unique” part mean? The answer is that the article you submit through UAW will be made in to hundreds of different versions, all from a single article – this can really help your business to get noticed and get a higher page ranking.

This service will help you to submit articles to 800 directories. All with one click and you do not have to sign up for the directories. You may have unlimited domains, pen names and niches. Here is the way it works. You write an article. The typical suggestion for the number of paragraphs is eight. Then you load your article to Unique Article Wizard.

After you have uploaded your article, Unique Article Wizard will walk you through the process of rewriting each paragraph of your article. They recommend rewriting your article twice; you will then have three versions of every paragraph. They will then take these paragraphs and make thousands of article from them.

This is how the Unique Article Wizard system works; they take these paragraphs and combine them in different ways to make multiple versions of your article. Each article will still say the same thing as your original article, be easy and enjoyable to read and won’t look like they were created using “article spinners”. Your keywords will be left intact, so your articles will be optimized and do the important job of helping your website’s page ranking more efficiently.

After you rewrite all of your paragraphs twice, you can even include back links. By adding these with keyword anchor text you will enable your site to attain higher page rankings. When all the different articles are created UAW submits them all over the web. Your articles will be on thousands of sites. You do not have to do anything. It is your choice whether to have the articles submitted all at one time or just a few every day.

As you can see, UAW is a powerful tool to get your business exposure; but how long will it take before you start to see results? The same day or the day after you submit your articles, UAW’s staff will look them over to ensure that the meet their terms of service. After this is done, your articles will begin going out at midnight that day.

Your articles will be submitted to directories which are relevant to the topic of your article (you choose the categories which your article is pertinent to). Usually, around 400-500 directories will be targeted for your articles. Over about a week, your article swill begin appearing in directories; keep in mind that some of these directories will take more or less time to go through submissions and that they all have their own guidelines, so it is possible for articles to be rejected by some directories.

On or around four days after you have submitted your article through UAW, search engines will start to notice your articles (and your website, of course). By this time, you’ll start getting a lot of back links to your website; and the more back links you have, the better your search engine ranking will be. UAW makes it all so easy – there are even helpful step by step tutorials and even video tutorials which will walk you through the process and let you get your articles out there and promoting your website.

© LindaJenkins for Niches 2 Riches Marketing Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: affiliate, Article Marketing, articles, backlinks, business, internet, marketing, niche traffic, pr, promotion, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, seo;positioning;placement, tools, traffic generation, website promotion

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Google AdWords is the most potent high-volume advertising tool on the Internet. Millions of Internet entrepreneurs use it to create and post ads around the world through Google and its search partners. It’s no wonder that you are keen to get started with Google Adwords and start making money.

The beauty of Google Adwords is that it can do something that no other form of advertising can do. Adwords can target the exact customers you need to make sales. Adwords grants you unmatched access to keyword generators and demographic tools, allowing you to find just the right keywords to bring in just the right demographic for maximum return on your advertising dollars. Anytime someone in your target demographic searches for your keyword phrase, your sponsored link will appear to the side of the screen. And you don’t have to pay for that ad unless someone clicks on it.

Let’s say you run a fantasy baseball site. With Google Adwords, you can create an add that allows you to target searches on fantasy baseball related keywords to show your ads. Every 30 days, between 74,000 and 20,000,000 people search for information about fantasy baseball, with the peak in March of every year. Competition from other advertisers is high, but the rewards are as well. At an average Cost per Click (CPC) of around $0.93, each click can bring a valuable, targeted visitor to your fantasy baseball site.

Let’s say you make $25 per sign up to your website. You get an additional $100 per 10,000 visits you get in ad revenue. The more people you can get coming to your website, the more money you will make. If one in 20 people signs up for your site after clicking your ad, you make $5 in profit per signup, plus whatever profit you make on advertising revenue for their repeat visits. If you find the right keywords so that one in 10 visitors from Adwords signs up for your site, you make $15 per signup. Twice the sign-up rate yields three times the profits. That’s the beauty of sticking with Adwords.

Like any other advertising option, Adwords is a basic investment. You put money in to get more money out. Unlike other advertising services, though, Google Adwords gives you more control over exactly what kind of traffic you generate for your website. You can choose whom to target, what kinds of searches to target, and when to display your ads for maximum response.

As you hone your target demographic, you will earn enough to reinvest in even more advertising to grow your niche on the net. Millions have done this already and proven that online advertising is one of the best moneymakers around.

© JustinHarrison for Niches 2 Riches Marketing Blog, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Affiliate Marketing, business, Business Building, computers, ecommerce, entrepreneur, internet, internet marketing, internet;business, marketing, niche advertising, Niche Marketing, seo, web development, website;promotion

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh