Have you visited Quantcast?

If you've never visited Quantcast, you're missing out on a lot of very useful information. You can go to Quantcast and enter the URL of a website you may be interested in promoting (as an affiliate marketer) and get a whole wealth of information about not only the site but the demographics of the average visitor.

This information can help you target your advertising and landing pages to your potential customers and relate to their needs. Anything you can do to see through their eyes will put you one step closer to making that sale.

You will still want to do your niche research (here is a link for help with your niche research), but Quantcast can be a valuable tool in your research.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

Submit to Social Websites

How to make a Squidoo Lens

Today we're going to look at how to creat a Squidoo Lens. You can make a lens and sell products using your affiliate link without even having a website.

You will still want to do your niche research. (Here is a link for help finding a profitable niche.) And you'll want to find profitable keywords (click here for the best keyword tool at the most economical price).

Check out this free video to explain how to open a Squidoo Lens. This video has some great information.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

Submit to Social Websites

Learning Social Networking

Web 2.0 and social networking is the process of site promotion via social media channels to attract targeted traffic. It is low-cost, but can be confusing and time consuming.

There are three types of marketers in respect to social networking. First there are those who don’t believe there is any value in social networking and don’t realize a social networking strategy can bring targeted visitors to any site or business. Then there are those who know nothing about social networking and last but not least, there are those who are interested but don’t know how to use it.

Those who don’t see the value are doomed to marketing mediocrity or worse total obscurity on the internet, fairing little better than those who have been living under a rock and know nothing about it. They both have much worse marketing problems than just not knowing or understanding.

The rest of us fall into the interested but don’t know enough about it group. We know participating in social networking can drive traffic to your site directly from social media websites. We also know, participating can provide links from the social networking sites which as we all know, are so very important to raise your page rank and help you garner visitors via the search engines. After that, it all seems to be just an insurmountable heap of indecipherable information.

To rectify this problem, over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some ideas and suggestions to help us get up and running in this area. We’ll take things one step at a time; we'll learn as we participate.

The first is the Netscape 9.0 browser. The main reason to use the browser is for its integration with the Netscape.com social news portal. You can submit and vote for sites, whether they have widgets installed of not. Just surf the net as usual, and when you run across a site of interest, simply vote for that site.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

Submit to Social Websites

Who are you marketing to?

Whether you’re doing business at the local mall or online, you’ve got to know your market. And if you’re doing business on the internet, over the last seven years the average internet user has changed.

According to eMarketer, the internet market that use to be mostly men is now mostly women – and likely to stay that way. In 2007, women equal about 51.7% of the internet population, and those numbers are expected to reach 51.9% by 2011.

Among other information reported, the eMarketers’ Women Online report analyzes the impact that new Internet video content and advertising are having—or not having—on female Internet users, who make up that very large US Internet population.

Amid all the excitement online video is causing, marketers must keep one fact in mind: Of the estimated 97 million females online in the US, only 66% of them actually watch videos online, compared with 78% of males who do. This and other statistics may change the way you want to market to your potential clients.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

No more sitemaps? You don’t say . . .

For those of us with websites, the competing search engines at SES (Search Engine Strategies) made the following announcement yesterday:

“Today, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! together are announcing support of “autodiscovery” of Sitemaps. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately.”

Find the full report at Ask.com’s official blog.

As far as I’m concerned the jury is still out as to whether sitemaps are worth the effort made by web owners. Personally I’ve found I have more pages indexed without a sitemap – autodiscovery or manually submitted. With my 60 page site I can count on having all my pages indexed unless I have a sitemap. With a sitemap my total pages indexed usually drops to 20 or so. And I’m not alone.

Many website owners I’ve talked to find they have the same results. To be fair, there are those who believe sitemaps are just wonderful. (The cat's meow.) My opinion is you need to test for yourself. Try your site with and without sitemaps and see which works best for you.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

What is Web 2.0?

Just what exactly is Web 2.0? What is it, what does it do, and what does it mean? Is there a precise definition that webmasters can get their little SEO boggled minds around? Well there probably is . . . . but I’m one of these people who likes to cut to the chase and get to the heart of the matter.

In business terms, Web 2.0 is the wave of the future. There are thousands and thousands of web surfers who depend exclusively on Web 2.0 for their web search choices. But the short answer is, Web 2.0 is just a giant game of tag. He who gets the most tags, wins the traffic prize.

The problem is, how to learn the rules, systems and players. It could be a full time job. And to overlook this market is to leave a lot of money on the table for somebody else.

If you try to Google Web 2.0 you get a lot of confusing and long rambling articles leaving you knowing just about as much as you did when you started. Enter Mike Worthington – this young man has taken the topic and made it his own. For a cut to the chase e-book on how to master Web 2.0, check out Web 2.0 Traffic System.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business