hotbizsol’s blog

Blogs have proved themselves to be the most effective Internet marketing tools. Blogs give us a lot of freedom to express ourselves and to group with like-minded people. Blogs are frequently crawled for updated content and blog posts often reflect whats on people's mind. Thats a quite useful information for marketeers. Blogs can be about just anything under the sun. You can find lots of blogs about any topic.

So, blogs have the most recently updated content, users ( bloggers and visitors ) and search engines attention. Needless to say, a back-link from a relevant blog to your web-site is an asset. It can result in good traffic and pass some page rank to your web-page. But its not easy to get links from these blogs. Comments on most of the blogs are moderated and links are often ineffective with a no-follow tag. Its almost useless to rely on comments to get backlinks from blogs. But you need them to get targeted traffic and high search engine rankings.

You can try these two sites that cater to this area. They can get you links from high performing blogs.

Review Me:

Review Me is a web-site that brings bloggers and advertisers together. Here is how it works.

You have a product to sell. You may be a re-seller or a direct marketing company. Its very important for the marketeer to increase the product's visibility and credibility among the targeted consumers. You can obtain the visibility by placing banners all over. But to improve credibility, you need some sort of testimonials, endorsements or positive reviews. Its too well known that buyers rely on other people's feedback and assurance. So, your marketing efforts need to include these tactics that improve the confidence of a buyer about your product. If you do it in-house, you might end up dishing out another routine sales pitch. If you can look around, you can find several enthusiastic bloggers that are discussing various topics that are related to your product or service. Blogs normally have a good traffic and their commercial intention is considered to be low, since people are expressing themselves freely there might be some negative comments also. You need not worry about the negative comments as it is an opportunity to prove that you really care for your customers.

At this site, ReviewMe.Com, you can find several blogs and regular bloggers. What all you need to do is to create an opportunity for them to blog about your product / service. Once you have got a few top blogs and bloggers to write about your product, you will start getting a steady stream of traffic and backlinks as these blogs often makes good use of RSS.

Click here to sign-up at their web-site, reviewme.com

Text Ad Links:

Text ad links is another site that tries to solve the problem of getting backlinks from blogs. Here blogs sell text ad links on their blogs. All the blogs listed are manually checked and approved.

They are regularly monitered for their relevancy, backlinks and traffic. So, you need not worry about the history of the blogs available to place a link. The link price varies according to blog's niche, its popularity, traffic, page rank and traffic. What you need to do us to search for blogs that are relevant to your product or website and buy text links on them. You pay more for good quality.

What makes this site more usable is its interface and intuitive process. You can guide yourself through the entire process of picking up blogs and placing links.

You can try this out by signing up from here: Text Link Ads

Most of you already know about CPA (Cost Per Action / Cost Per Acquisition) networks. You may also be aware of the difficulty involved to get into these networks. The more difficult it is, the more challenging it becomes. But you need not waste your time worrying about getting into the grand daddies of CPA networks. There are still some other networks available with attractive offers and are relatively easy to get into.

For those who don't really know about CPA networks, here is a brief introduction. CPA networks are similar to affiliate networks where the commission is payed to the publisher when a visitor performs an action ( usually a sale / sign-up for trail / sign-up for a newsletter etc.). The visitor needs to perform an action that could eventually lead to a sale. This is different from the PPC model, where a publisher earns revenue based on the number of clicks generated from his web properties.

Advantages for advertisers:

This is definitely oriented towards the advertisers as they pay only for qualified leads that spent time on performing some action ( for example, filling up a form ). The longer and difficult it is to fill the form, the more qualified the lead. We don't usually take so much pain to fill a 2 or 3 page form where we need to recall quite a bit about ourselves. For example, I am suffering from a disease. I will spend few minutes disclosing my problem to some pharmaceutical company thats offering me a free sample. What I tell them, also determines if I am a patient or not. If I am looking just for a free sample, not a remedy for my disease, I may not get it at all. They can tell it apart. But in practice, we can get a free sample most of the time.

A qualified and genuine lead is more valuable for business. The advertiser need not spend huge amounts of money and time to follow up and filter all leads that he gets through general marketing.

The advertiser pays only for qualified leads, thereby putting the pressure on publishers / affiliates to send more targeted traffic to his offer.

Advantages for publishers:

In the good old days of PPC, all we had to do is to build a few content web-sites and display PPC ads. There was a steady stream of income. Times have changed a bit. Things like 'smart pricing' and 'click fraud' began to spoil the party for many web-masters. More complex systems began to take over and ad revenues turned southwards.

But there is a good news. What CPA networks offer a publisher is not just high incentives for qualified leads, but also a fraud detection system. An average publisher need not worry about the click fraud activity thats going on at his web-site. Its not the clicks that get counted and the fraud detection is taken care of by the network. If a publisher is clever enough to improve the quality of his / her web-site, they can generate good quality leads and there by earning good revenues through CPA networks.

But again, its difficult to get into a CPA network. Most of the CPA networks screens the applications manually. You need to have at-least one well performing content web-site, even though you are ready to promote offers by email or PPC. Most networks also have a manual check process through telephonic conversations. You may need to prove that you have earned some revenues online by doing active marketing for quite some time.

If you are having difficulty in getting into those high-ticket CPA networks, you can try these ones. I have found several high paying offers at these networks and I had very less difficulty in getting into them. Almost 'No Questions Asked'.

1. Pepper Jam Network 

2. Affiliateer 

We all know that AdWords is quite tricky game to play. If you have learned some of those secrets, you can make a lot of money. If you don't know how to play it properly, you will end up losing quite a bit of money. Its a fact that most of the Internet marketers burn their hands at AdWords, atleast initially, till they learn atleast a few tricks of the trade.

There are too many strategies that need to be implemented for a success. Good Keywords, High CTRs, good landing pages, Quality Scores, Bid Management etc etc. You need to be good with excel and some mathematics to analyze the enormous data you will be getting from your campaigns. And you need to have a lot of budget to spend. You cannot play this game with a meagre amount of a few hundred dollars a month. Because, you will not be in a position to dominate or play around with others. With small budgets, you can do a bit of experimentation, but you can be pushed around by big players. Big players will have an advantage of ability to spend on experimentation and learning. If you wanna make a lot of money, play with a lot of money.

If you are too busy or too lazy to do the experiments or implementing strategies, you can still make a lot of money at AdWords. How?. By copying other people's successful campaigns. Its quite simple, you know that companies sell products through affiliates over the Internet. Some affiliates are quite successful, while others are not. The most successful affiliates are those who did all the hardwork and worked out best strategies to use. They are minting money. What if you can get such a blue print for yourself?. You need not steal it from anybody. There are people that want to share their successful campaign information with you. You can make money as they were making, because they are sharing their total campaign information with you.

Isn't it unethical? No, it not. The successful marketers themselves are revealing their strategies to you. Companies need to sell more and more. Its a win-win situation for everybody. What your mentors gain is the confidence of companies that will entrust their future product launches with them.

Check out a few of them here:

Copy and Profit from MyCampaigns

SEM Business Blueprint

You can easily boost your click through rates and reduce your advertising costs. But you need to do some experimentation and be willing to learn a bit.

Based on the budget you can set aside for experimentation and learning, you can try some or all of the following techniques to dominate adwords. These are not anything new, but most advertisers are afraid to employ them.

1.Dynamic headlines – As most of you know dynamic headlines replace your normal ad headline with what the searcher types in. So, if the searcher types, “computer”, this appears in the headline. And if the searcher types in a search phrase that can't fit, such as “Affordable home computer for family,” then it reverts back to your default headline. You can use that by inputting, “{KeyWord:Home Computer}” in the headline portion of your ad. “Home Computer” is your default headline. You can also add qualifiers and additional words around your keyword. You can also use dynamic headlines, in the ad description. However it may not fit well within the ad description.

Dynamic headlines can significantly boost click through rates. But, they also sometimes reduce the quality traffic you get, if your keywords are not targeted well. For example if you are selling a home computer and your keywords list contains 'home entertainment', a visitor may be looking for a home theatre while typing in 'home entertainment' in the search box and your dynamic headline gets displayed as 'home entertainment' and the visitor clicks your ad as its headline matches exactly what he is looking for, but instead lands on your page that's selling a home computer. This is not either the visitor or you wanted to happen. Before experimenting with dynamic headline, make sure to clean up your keywords lists.

2. Track your ad positions, the No 1 position may not be all that good.

Top position guarantees you a lot of traffic, usually. But it may not be the best quality traffic.It also depends on what you are advertising. But you should remember that top position is vulnerable for abuse. People might be curious or the competitors might be trying to exhaust your budget or the bids are just too high give any meaningful ROI.

You should experiment with various ad positions, by adjusting your bids over a period of time and check the conversion rates for various ad positions. Sometimes, you might find a number three or four position to be more profitable. Sometimes, even if your low bid gives you a default ad position on page 2 or 3, based on the competitors bidding patterns, your ad may be shown on desired ad positions. For example, many bidders cut off their campaigns during mid night hours, you can get top positions easily for a fraction of cost. So, don't be afraid to experiment a bit and adjust bids to test various ad positions.

3. Using content placement – This option allows advertisers to place their ads on specific content sites related to their business. Its a completely different ball game than search traffic. Here you normally pay for impressions rather than clicks. If you can determine this CPM value correctly, it can save you a lot of money by delivering desired traffic. To arrive at the right CPM, you may run a CPC campaign on search or content network to see how many clicks you are getting for 1000 impressions and at what cost. Start by applying this cost for 1000 impressions to your content placement ads and gradually adjust the bids to reach your desired traffic goals.

Usually when a market is in its infancy and your target market is NOT searching for what your have to offer and the only way they can be reached is in their communities this type of advertising can help. These communities might be blogs, discussion forums, or news sites.

4. Get the best text ad to work harder.

Normally, after running your ads for quite some time... split testing and optimizing them... you can find your best performing ad. This can do a lot of wonders for you. You can make a few variations of your best ad and make a creative banner based on that. Its very likely that variations of the best performing ad can easily out-perform all other ads in your campaign. So, its worth creating banners and other format ads based on your best performing ad.

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Make money online by copying our successful campaigns

What search engine robots do is to look for words and phrases, not meaningful sentense construction. 'join our affiliate program and earn a thousand dollars per day!' is just the same as 'dollar thousand affiliate per day our join' are the same in the eyes of a search engine!. But is not for us, humans. Thats why search engines often take into account the visitor behaviour at a particular website rather than fully relying on the site's content for ranking. Its also to be noted that the more intersting the content, the more back links the site can attract.

Any SE Optimizer can tell you that an article needs to be atleast 50% different from its seed article. Very few tools can achive this apart from article writers. An average web master will be quite happy with a 5-15% of changes made to a seed article and publishes it on a website. But we need to remember that search engines often have duplicate content filters that may be hard to impress. A completely re-written article needs to be quite different without losing the meaning and keyword richness.

Many times, you will be wondering if writing a new article is less stressful than re-writing the article. Its true in some cases. A well formed article gives you a very less chance of making changes. If its so well written that even replacing a word with a synonym looks odd in the article, the you can well start writing a new article with the same idea. Some pre-written articles are good for rewriting. You can ideas about how to rewrite the article, even while you were reading it. You can say to yourself, I can expand on a few points. Such articles can take very less time and looks completely different from their seed articles.

But, if you are careful enough and have some patience, you can use those numerous software tools available for re-writing or spinning articles. Just sit for a day and go though all the articles generated, correcting sentenses here and there. Articles rewriters and spinners generally do a good job with keywords, but the articles generated need to be checked for syntax and syntactical errors.

Some of the article rewriters and spinners:

Mass Article Control

Online Article Changer

Jet Spinner

One of the most frequent questions people ask me is that whats the most difficult part of SEO. When I got this question posed to me for the first time, I have answered 'link building', but after some time, I have realized a few things from doing different kinds of SEO projects. Now my answer is 'content'. Because original and unique content can help a lot with link building also. I cannot ask for a link when my site doesnt have relavent content that interests an average visitor.

Not only for he website, we need a lot of content in the form of articles, headings, ads, forum posting, blog posting, comments related to our website. The content needs to be unique, else all your postings get nowhere into directories or moderated forums. Content can be anything as long it is relevant and readable to humans. A typical website might need about 100 articles for all the promotional needs. Its just a 100 articles you may think, but when you try to write them down it becomes a bit more difficult. The difficulty is not about writing, but writing relevant content that was unique and original at the same time can be well understood by humans. It becomes even more difficult when you try to make them keyword rich and optimized.

There are certain tools that can help you to re-write or spin articles, such as mass article control , free online article rewriter, jet spinner etc. They do a reasonable job with article rewriting and spinning. Some of them are capable of generating a lot of articles from a single article. But neverthless, you will need to edit them a bit to make them suitable for submission. A lot of them work based on the principle of synonym replacement and re-arranging the paragraphs to make an article to look different. But you need hundreds of them right? You have to put some manual effort into that. A little help from one of these tools can make your task of producing articles a bit easier.

Some of the article rewriters and spinners:

mass article control

Online Article Changer

Jet Spinner

SEO is traditionally believed to be useful for content site and its rightfully so. The more content you have the more traffic from those long tail keywords, you can get. There is a chance to optimize each page for a particular keyword, thereby create pages for all targeted keywords. You can have a lot of space left for placing links and ads. Usually. A huge site with original content gets free one way links as well. That's why content sites generally appear on top of search results. You can see that most forums, discussion boards or authority sites are the ones that appear on top. Having said that its not that easy to build content and manage it. Its a laborious and long-term process, that gets rewarded in free traffic.

How can we get SEO rankings for a small business web site that has a local business and the website has only a few pages of content. ( home, products, services, why us, clients, about us, contact us ). Many small business websites don't have more than 20 pages. They are usually well designed with a lot of visual elements occupying the page than any content. And the content is usually sales pitch while the images are used to describe / display products. Product descriptions are usually technical specifications. It works for them if they run a PPC campaign as all major ad networks offer precise Geo-targeting and bidding options. A business can benefit immensely by running PPC campaigns.

However there might be some cases where the targeted keywords are quite expensive or the SEO is thought to be generating more relevant leads than click-happy visitors that come to a website because the ad looks 'interesting' or you are becoming a victim of click-fraud. Whatever may be the situation, it always helps to do some SEO with your website, even if you have wads of currency to spend at PPC campaigns.

From the above, you can easily guess the difficulties involved. A small website with negligible content targeting consumers in a small geographical area. By nature, these small business websites don't need tons of traffic from regions outside their area of operation. What they need is to generate enough leads they can handle. First it looks there is a lot of off-page optimization needs to be done as there is little scope for on-page matters. As I have found with many such websites, there is a room for improvement in the on-page optimization for these websites. Most of them have poor on-page optimization. These are small concerns, but can make a huge difference when it comes to search engine rankings.These things need to be taken care of, before we can move into that off-page stuff.

Some of these websites are good for link building while some others offer a greater opportunity with article marketing. Any experienced SEO strategist can find which works better for a given small company website. An SEO strategist knows much about SEO, but s/he may not know much about the business. Here the company needs to communicate the nature of their business and about the competition. Once the optimizer had a good understanding about the business that he is going to promote, it results in a good SEO campaign. Some SEO projects fail simply because the SEO people have little or no understanding about what they are optimizing.

Good thing about small business websites are most of them are well designed with a lot of contact information. Conversion rates are high if you can bring a even a moderately interested visitor to the site.

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You can reach me, Jaya Kumar Patchala, at : jkpatchala@gmail.com

One of the most time consuming part, when you are trying to build a new website, is to convey your ideas to the web designer and getting all specifications right. There is is a lot of time lost when you try to find a web developer to work within your budget and getting the site done correctly.

In my earlier days with internet, I have faced too much problem to get my sites done quickly. I couldnt put everything on paper, scan it and send it to the developer. Then trying to get the layout and colors right and so on.... its time cnsuming. After a while I found a

WYSIWYG free website builder, BlueVoda. Its free, compact, useful and is my favourite to do the initial stages of web designing. Its drag and drop functionality and source code generation are quite impressive. Just a few mouse clicks and you can draw your thoughts for your website. Its a full blown web designing tool, provided you can host your site with vodahost and can afford keep all the div tags and inline CSS markup. For an experienced HTML programmer, who can do some work with the generated file, it can help in layout or template design.

When I have downloaded its recent free version, I have found several amazing enhancements such as PayPal buttons. Quite a lot of features for a free software and I have used it without buying their hosting services,as I am familiar with HTML and most of my sites are dynamic. If you are inexperienced, you can use BlueVoda to make a website and upload it to Vodahost, without any worries about FTP or hosting control panel. Its perhaps one of the quickest ways to create and publish a website on your own.

Even if you are not buying their hosting, its still a very useful software to play around with. Its quite intuitive and easy. The most interesting features of this BlueVoda is the inbuilt button generators. There are plenty of button styles and fonts to work with. All the preliminary graphics are taken care of, such as backgrounds, shapes etc. All you need is some imagination and content to make a beautiful website within a few hours. Even for the experienced web designers, BlueVoda can offer some help with the layout design. It probably helps those who cant do it with Photoshop. As I said its quite a fun to work with this free web designing software. If you have access to free graphics or photographs, all you have to do is drop them onto the page. Its that simple.

Download Free Website Builder – BlueVoda - You will love it!

Once again Brad Callen has come up with something that is very useful for online marketers. PPC web spy is a Google keyword research tool that spies on your competitors keywords. The best part of it is it works as a browser plug-in (Mozilla FireFox). You can spy on your competition or learn about any ad campaigns, while doing your regular searches on Google. No more bulky or desktop software to install that keeps you waiting while it processes your request. And PPC web spy has a free version too.

Lets see how it works. You can download PPC Web Spy from here, install this into Mozilla FireFox and start using it. The instructions are clear. Once you have installed PPC web spy, you can get a lot of information about the top adwords ads that are getting displayed in Google SERPs. You can see the keywords that advertisers are bidding on. For each keyword you can get information such as position, Average CPC, Max CPC, clicks per day and cost per day. Any experienced online marketer can immediately see the usefulness of this information.

By analyzing your competitor’s campaigns, you can arrive at your own PPC strategies. For example you can estimate your position, clicks and costs well in advance. As most of you know the prime positions on Google are the top ads and the top 3 positions on the right hand side. If you ad is not in those positions, you are likely to get less clicks or low-quality clicks.

By adjusting your bids as against your competitors bids (since you can get all the necessary information about all the ads on a SERP), you can easily position your ad into those hot spots from where quality clicks emanate from. That’s a big advantage.

Didn’t I tell you, there is a free version of PPC Web Spy that you can download here. Its free forever, but with a limited information. But that’s good to start with.

Improving Google’s quality score for your landing pages ensures that your landing page is more relevant and ad costs are lower. You have to take into account what Google thinks for a good landing page. Advertisers that fail to provide relevant information, ease of navigation, original content or usefulness are penalized for that. This policy ensures that advertisers get the maximum ROI and visitors get what they are looking for. In other words a good search engine optimized landing page is a good starting point for a landing page. You won’t get high quality score, just because you are paying higher than others. Do your preliminary SEO with your landing page and then refine it to make it perfect. It results in better quality score, higher rankings and lower CPC.

How to get a better landing page quality score?

Among the other, there are 3 things you should consider:  original and relevant content, transparency of the transaction and information, and ease of navigation.  Here’s how to get a good quality score from Google and get high conversions.

Relevancy: You domain name is relevant or atleast you make your title tags relevant. For each keyword, create a separate landing page and with the keyword in the meta tags and file name. This ensures that even if your domain name didn’t have that keyword, your landing page’s URL will have that keyword.

Even if you are an affiliate and got ready-made landing pages, modifying your affiliate page to make it more search engine friendly and unique can help a lot. You just re-write the copy, better still create 2-3 landing pages from the same information optimize each and then check with Google for the quality score.

Transparency: For any business transaction, there is a need for transparency. To make yourself a trusted vendor, you need to provide a few basic things on your landing page. Links to contact us page, privacy policy, terms of service, warranties and sitemap.

An obvious aspect of transparency is by delivering on the products and services that you offer in your ad, and to only charge customers for the products and services that they actually order and successfully receive.  While this may seem implicit in your site, it doesn’t hurt to find a way to say it somewhere on the landing page.  It will both raise your quality score with Google as well as put your users at ease.

Navigation: Many webmasters think navigation is a distraction on a landing page. But if you are not providing enough information on the landing page, visitors obviously try to learn more by clicking links or typing the URL directly, Worse still they may even move away from your site. So, you need to provide links to some pages that are essential (as described in the previous paragraph). In addition you may provide additional information with popup boxes or show / hide content boxes. The visitor need not leave the landing page for further information.

Another factor is the ease of transaction. When the user is going through the purchase process, you need to provide enough comments and directions on how to make the purchase and receive the product. You have to make the process as easy and understandable as possible. If possible indicate the steps user is going through.

As you can see most of the above are a part of SEO. Overall a well optimizes website or a webpage can act as a good landing page. By taking the above measures can make your landing pages more relevant and useful your visitors and convert better.