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Drop Shipping Your Way to Increased Sales & Profits...
Drop shipping, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is a system whereby you promote the products of a particular manufacturer, take orders directly, and the manufacturer/source handles all the inventory and fulfillment functions for you.
In a...
Keyword Ownership: What it is and Where it's Headed
Keyword Ownership: What It Is and Where It's Headed? By: Richard Zwicky Published: August 20, 2003, SiteProNews. Have you ever got one of those silly emails that offers to let you own a keyword? Silly question. How many such emails do you get...
Podcasting Used As a Business Marketing Tool by Media Publishing Giant Simon & Schuster
Copyright 2005 Rodney Rumford
Podcasting has hit the marketing world big time with the recent launch of a new podcast by Simon & Schuster. I was recently involved in a consulting role with a podcasting project with publishing giant Simon and...
Promote your website using Newsgroups
You may publish this article in your newsletter, on your website, or other publication as long as the article content is not altered and the resource box is included. Add byline with active link. Notification of the use of this article is...
Why You Need More Than One Affiliate Program
There are many reasons why not to have just one affiliate program. Primarily, what happens when the one company that you are affiliated with changes hands, policies, or just plain falls apart. The downline that you worked so hard to build, and to...
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Link Swapping - The Best Traffic Generator
In an article I wrote recently, called Five Point Plan for
Promotion, I suggested swapping links with people already linking
to your competitor's sites and this generated a few questions
about how to do that specifically, which is what I shall attempt
to explain here.
For the benefit of those of you who have come in half way through
this conversation, swapping links benefits you in two significant
ways. Firstly in generating highly targeted direct traffic from
those links and secondly in making you "popular" to the search
engines' algorithms, thus improving your rankings.
Don't worry about the technicalities of this, just know that the
more links you have back to your site, the better off you are
with some of the engines. They all work differently, they all
change their way of working - develop - so it is impossible for
those of us who come under the heading of "average" to keep up
with the finite detail.
Why Competitors?
Don't get me wrong. It would be a mistake to go out on the net
with the attitude of beating the competition into submission with
unfair tactics. That is not what this game is about. The net has
opened up the possibility for more bartering, sharing and
cooperation and in the long run that will get you further. It is
a method especially suited to low-budget marketing.
By all means study who is popular at what you do and strive to be
better than them. The top reason I suggest linking to those who
link to your competitors is because, intrinsically I am lazy! I
am assuming that it will be less work to persuade those people -
who are already in the business of linking - to do so again.
Nuts and bolts ...
So how do you do this exactly? First, find out who comes up at
the top for the keywords you use to find your site. Do this by
searching several search engines at once using WebFerret or
Copernic2000. You'll soon see who keeps scoring again and again.
Now you want to find who links to them and those will
be the
people to whom you write requesting a link-swap.
One way you can try it is by using the little add-on that Alta
Vista provides. That kindly adds an option (in Internet Explorer
5) to the Tools along the menu, called "Find pages linking to
this URL" - thus go to your's or your competitor's page and hit
the button. Download the tool here:
http://doc.altavista.com/help/search/linksearch.shtml
There is also specific syntax you can enter into each search
engine's box, which will make it look for a URL, rather than for
keywords. They all seem to have different requirements.
Many of those are listed in an excellent article, Web & Search
Engine Facts You Need to Know to Win the Marketing Game, By David
Gikandi. The article has a lot of information on each of the
major search engines and how they work, including "How to check
how many pages link to your site". David is a programmer at
SearchPositioning.com. (www.searchpositioning.com). A copy of the
article can be found at:
http://www.tucats-design.com/news/issue9.html
Also, there are several of these specific syntax requirements
listed in Boogie Jack's Webmaster Tips program, FREE download and
well worth it, from:
http://www.boogiejack.com ipaday.html
Once you have found your targets, visit the sites, find the
webmaster's email address and write offering a link swap.
Personalise the email, stress the benefits to the other party -
it will benefit their traffic and search engine rankings too -
and you should have a reasonable success rate.
One quick boost, following along the principles above, is to
participate in a simple system called Search Engine Beater
http://www.ismy.net/searchbeater.html
About the Author
Pamela Heywood is webmistress of http://www.tucats-design.com
- Building Your Online Business Instinctively. Subscribe to the
weekly TuCats Mewsletter (sic) mailto:subscribe@tucats-design.com
and get regular FREE hints, tips, articles and resources.
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