Selfless

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Steps to Make Money by Generating Traffic

Currently, a lot of individuals are interested with the idea of developing their own websites. This is due to the huge number of people who are already earning income through their own sites. If you want to earn money over the Internet, there are things which you have to put into consideration. The first would be the right attitude. You need to possess perseverance and determination. These characteristics will help you get to the top. Other than your positive outlook, you also need the following.

Online forums you will be able to concentrate on an audience group whom will take interest on what you have to offer.

Send out newsletters you might want to create a catalog list of your services or products. You can send this out through newsletters.

Exchange links do this with other online sites. You can opt to link for free but you have to agree to include that certain site within your page.

Post articles when you opt for this marketing method, make sure that the article contains relevant information. Make sure that it is also related to what you are offering.

Create a good content for your site dont put up too much graphics within your site. This way, your page will download easily.

Use meta tags and keywords the keywords should be associated with your products. This way, when readers type in certain words; they will get directed to your site.

Banners there are some sites which allow you to put up a banner of your site for free. You can opt for this when you have a limited budget.

Affiliate programs when you promote affiliate programs, you will be able to gain more audience. This is possible when you link your site to their site.

Develop a communication box this is between you and your clients, so that you will know what their other needs are.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1574 articles in print and 11 published ebooks.

Bill Gates
Spiritual

Forums with Main Page - SEO & Visitors Friendly

Why having a simple html main page for your forum instead of the forum page is good?

Ok, what I meant for a simple static html main page is the page which is on your top level domain and with a link to your forum. For example, your forum is in a subfolder say /forums and so the html main page will be at the mainpage with a big, very visible link to your subfolder /forums

The main page should have a few images (small in size and related to your forum) to make it look presentable, the fonts and colors should also be very close to your forum and the main links (make them big and visible) should be to your forum along with a link to a gallery/online store/directory/detail page. They should not have lots of scripts (unless necessary) and other nonsense. The main keyword here is simple.

Why you ask? Read below then.

Loads fast

Everyone hates waiting for a slow page to load, but when your html page is light and fast and not loaded with unnecessary scripts and images, you will not face this problem here. And for the first time visitor, this is important. Even repeat visitors hate the waiting time. Now with so many websites and forums out there, how many of us click on the stop button on our browsers when the page doesnt show fast and we move on to the next site or forum?

And not forgetting, these are very static pages, which doesnt take up a lot of server resources, a good point if you want your pages to load up fast.

Explains your visitors what your forum is about

Have you done a search about something and was directed to a forum, but you have no idea what the forum is about? A lot of forums dont give a description about the site, only the title. Having a main page to tell your visitors what your forum is about makes your forum less confusing and thus more appealing and interesting to viewers.

Of course, it is a bit troublesome for the visitor to have to click one more time to access your forums. But for the repeat visitors, they can just bookmark your forum page or just use the browsers URL history to access your forum directly.

Easy to edit and modify

Having a single static html page, you can edit or add meta tags as you wish. Meta descriptions or keywords can added or editing easily without going a deep subdirectory to search for the template of your forum. Adding links and advertisements is also much easier, since basically your main page is html. Want to add alt for your main page images or bold your keywords or title or even change your images titles for SEO? Heck, you want to add h1 and h2 tags? No problem. These are all easily done with a text editor and the file you need to edit is index.htm and the location is at the html root of your web server.

How about when you need to add a link at your footer to the directory which requires a reciprocal back-link? Or deleting off the link that has been banned by Google?

Having a html page also allows you to design your page as you see fit. Although it depends on your html coding & graphics skills, you are not constrained by your forums templates and theme design and you can organize it in such a way that you can easily edit or modify the code.

And yes, html is very Search Engine friendly. Just dont use frames, use CSS.

And please remember that your forum script itself must be optimized for Search Engines as well.

Allows you to have other content/sections

A forum can never beat a normal website for content, so adding something else can help generate interest for you forum, like a gallery or an online store or a blog or even an article directory. I feel that a forum alone can never generate enough buzz to make members keep coming back or even get members to signup. Even forum scripts nowadays have mods which add in a portal or a gallery or a directory because of this sad fact. But they too suffer from the same problem, difficult to edit and they are not Search Engine Friendly as html.

Giving your first time visitor an option to choose which section of your site to go helps make them think of what is in that link other than your forum. It will make your forum more appealing. However, you should make sure that the content is relevant to your forum or it might just drive traffic away from your forum.

Boon Leong is the admin of Simple Sites ( http://www.simpleboards.org ) a forum promoting the use of basic layouts & styles to create elegant & stylish websites.

Howard Cutler
Gary Renard