7 Search Engine Strategies That Work

By Michael Fleischner | Marketing Expert, Internet Marketing Secrets*

As the Internet becomes even more pervasive, the importance of search engine optimization continues to grow. You can make the most of your Internet marketing efforts by following the same steps that top ranking sites do for improvinge their rankings. You may think that top ranking sites have to spend lots of money to get there. The truth is that sites who come out on top, follow some basic search engine optimization guidelines. These guidelines are easy to follow and often cost little or nothing to put into practice.

1. Manually register your site with DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project. The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors and feeds other leading web directories.

2. Manually submit your site to Google. If you'd like to wait, Google will eventually spider your site and return it in search result listings related to your site name and keywords. However, this may take some time. For faster inclusion, visit Google and submit your site manually.

3. Purchase a listing with Yahoo! Directory Submit. Yahoo! like Google provides many search products. However, Directory Submit is essential for any business on the web. For a fee of $299 Yahoo! will include your web site in their directory that fuels websites like Yahoo!, MSN and AltaVista.

4. Make sure you are using keywords with a high KEI. This measure takes into consideration both the popularity and competitiveness of your keywords. By focusing on keywords with a higher KEI, you can optimize your chance for search engines to select your site for keywords at little or no expense.

5. Engage in a link building campaign. The more links you have to your site, especially if they have a high Google Page Rank, will signal Google and other search engines that your site is important. A great way to do this is through article submission or affiliate programs.

6. Make your site easily to crawl. Search engine do not like dynamic pages. Although this is changing with the advent of Google Site Maps, it is still important to ensure that all search engines can easily traverse your website. Make sure to use HTML coding and avoid dynamically created pages.

7. Be patient. Once you follow these suggestions, allow search engines time to re-index your site. In the Internet age, we're looking for instant results. However, it does take some time for all of your search engine optimization techniques to take hold.

By implementing the suggestions we've discussed in this article, your search engine optimization efforts can generate positive returns. As the world of search engines continue to evolve, it's important to learn about the latest techniques and requirements for improving search engine results. Continue to focus on SEO. If you do, you'll find yourself at the top of the rankings!

* Michael Fleischner is a marketing expert and the president of MarketingScoop.com, the Internet’s biggest source of marketing information and free marketing resources. He has more than 12 years of marketing experience and has appeared on The TODAY Show, Bloomberg Radio, and other major media. Visit Marketingscoop.com for further details, Internet marketing secrets, or more FREE reprint articles.

Making Money Online with Google AdSense

By Michael Fleischner | Marketing Expert, Internet Marketing Secrets*

Many marketing professionals are using Google to place targeted ads in front of prospective customers. This is increasingly effective due to the highly targeted nature of Google AdWords. Google AdSense, the other side of the online advertising equation, allows website owners to make money by provided contextually targeted ads to their website traffic.

Providing targeted ads to your online visitors creates a better user experience and communicates your knowledge of the audience you serve. Google AdSense automatically delivers text and image ads that are precisely targeted to your site and your site content through the Google AdSense advertising system.

If you're involved with an affiliate program such as commission junction, you know that signing up with, and maintaining relationships with advertisers is a full-time job. With Google AdSense, Google manages the relationships with advertisers for you, making the process simple and easy to manage. Once you place the appropriate code on your website, the AdSense program requires basically no maintenance.

How You Make Money

When you display Google ads on your website, you create the potential to generate revenue. Google places relevant cost-per-click and cost per thousand impressions ads into a real-time auction and lets multiple advertisers compete against one another for displaying their ad. The auction takes place instantaneously and when it's over AdSense automatically displays the text or image ads that will generate the maximum revenue for a given page, resulting in the maximum revenue for a web site owner.

Ads Are Updated When Your Content Changes

Google AdSense technology analyses the content of your web pages and delivers ads that are relevant automatically, no matter how many pages of content your site may have. As your content changes, Google's ads change to match.

Google Ads Can be Customized in Look and Feel

AdSense allows you to customize the appearance of your ads to fully match the look and feel of your site. As of the writing of this article, Google AdSense provides more than 200 colors and 24 pre-set color palettes to choose from. Additionally, you can create and save your own custom palettes using a point-and-click color selection tool which is relatively simple to use. This ensures a consistent user experience for those browsing your web site.

Track Your Earnings Online

The key to making money with Google AdSense is to monitor your ad performance with customizable online reports. These reports are available online and offer details regarding the number of page impressions delivered, clicks, and click-through rate. You can also track the performance of specific ad formats, colors and pages, allowing you to spot trends quickly and easily. The reporting tool lets you group your web pages however you want, so you can gain insight into your earnings by viewing results by URL, domain, ad type, and category. When you spot revenue trends, develop more content for your site in the areas that produce the highest Google AdSense revenue.

If you are interested in getting started as a Google AdSense publisher, just go to your web browser and type in Google AdSense. You'll find information about the program and a link to the program registration form. Signing up is pretty easy. It only takes a few minutes to apply online for both content and search ads. Once you're approved, you simply need to log in to your account, copy and paste a block of HTML code into your existing ad server or directly into any of your web pages. Relevant ads start to appear on your web pages right away, and you start making money from the first impression or click.

Be sure to evaluate the effectiveness of your program at least once per week. Doing so allows you to determine what type of content is driving the largest percentage of your online advertising revenue. As mentioned previously, when developing new content for your site, be sure to focus on the areas that are driving the greatest ad revenue as indicated by your online Google AdSense reports.

* Michael Fleischner is a marketing expert and the president of MarketingScoop.com, the Internet’s biggest source of marketing information and free marketing resources. He has more than 12 years of marketing experience and has appeared on The TODAY Show, Bloomberg Radio, and other major media. Visit the Marketing Blog Directory on his website for access to Internet marketing secrets and more.

The 7 Most Common Marketing Mistakes

By Michael Fleischner | Marketing Expert, Internet Marketing Secrets*

When marketing your product or service, you need to have a firm understanding of your audience, the message you want to deliver, the offer you're willing to make, and the optimal timing for your marketing campaign.

Too often novice marketers, even marketing veterans, make costly mistakes that result in poor performance of their marketing campaign. Common marketing mistakes can be avoided with adequate planning, attention to detail, and ongoing measurement and evaluation.

If you're considering a traditional marketing campaign, an Internet marketing campaign, or something that's never been tried before, be sure to avoid these common marketing mistakes.

1. Timing. You may have a great list, a fantastic offer, and even a well designed marketing piece, but if your timing is off, so too will be your results. As an experienced marketer, I have seen some very expensive marketing campaigns that were very compelling but failed to produce results. This is because the campaign reached consumers at a time in which they had no interest in buying the product. For example, trying to sell snow shovels in July would not be considered good timing.

2. Failure to Test Your Headline. As the first thing your prospect usually reads, the headline is essential for luring your prospective buyer into the message, your offer, and the action you want them to take. Regardless of the medium, you should continually test your headlines (or subject lines) by running split tests and evaluating response. This ensures that your marketing message attracts the largest number of prospective buyers.

3. Failure to Test Your Offer. In direct marketing, the offer is directly correlated to 40% of your response. If you have the right offer, people respond. There are other factors to consider as well, but providing a compelling offer is required in most instances. Offers can range from discounts to "hurry while supplies last", but the commonality remains. Test your offers for optimizing response.

4. Having a Good List. Having the best offer and award-winning
design is not enough. For many types of marketing campaigns, success is directly tied to having a targeted list. With today's sophisticated list generation tools, you can acquire lists that are highly segmented based on demographics, psychographics, buying behavior, and many other characteristics.
The key here is not to be penny wise and pound foolish. If you're wondering where to invest your marketing dollars, spend them on developing a good house list (names you acquire on your own) or by renting/purchasing a well segmented marketing list.

5. Relying on a Single Communication. On average, consumers are hit with over 2,000 marketing messages everyday. In fact, recent studies have indicated that consumers need to see your marketing message an average of 12 times before they take notice. If there is any truth to the claim in part or in whole, it means that you must communicate to prospects on a regular basis. Placing a single ad in the newspaper or sending a single email cannot deliver effective results. Determine the media that prospects use to gather information and develop an ongoing campaign that works within your budget.

6. Not Measuring Campaign Effectiveness. Over time, your business is going to do a lot of marketing. Even if you are a small business wondering how you're going to communicate to a prospective audience, you're going to eventually have some type of communication. Regardless of the marketing campaign size or expense, you need to track your results. This can be done with a simple spreadsheet or a multi-million dollar CRM system. The bottom line is you need to record what works and what doesn't so that you can improve your results in the future.

7. Failure to Continue the Dialogue. After consulting for a number of large companies, I'm still amazed at how many fail to communicate to customers on an ongoing basis. Often times, consumers or businesses only hear from the seller when its time to buy again. If you have an established customer base, chances are you've worked hard to acquire them. You should be spending some of your marketing budget to retain them. Be sure to open a dialogue with customers, solicit their feedback, and communicate with them regularly. This will help to build your business over the long-term.

If you're new to marketing, have experience as a marketing professional, or simply want to improve your current marketing results, be sure to learn from the mistakes of others. To be successful, continually work towards improving your marketing effectiveness. Avoid the 7 most common marketing mistakes, and you're on your way to delivering tangible results.

* Michael Fleischner is a marketing expert and the president of MarketingScoop.com, the Internet’s biggest source of marketing information and free marketing resources. He has more than 12 years of marketing experience and has appeared on The TODAY Show, Bloomberg Radio, and other major media. Visit the marketingscoop.comMarketing Blog Directory