Copyright (c) 2009 Titus Hoskins

As we enter into what many enlightened souls are calling the most dire economic times since the Great Depression, online marketers need all the help they can get – regardless of the source. You have probably heard of Google; but chances are almost 100% certain, you have never heard of me. Lucky you!

Actually, the only thing you need to know about me is that I am a full-time online affiliate marketer and I make a very comfortable living from the web. Last year (2008), was my best year online so far, which left me scratching my head and saying what recession?

But that may be something of a false positive, as I will never know how much I could have made if the economic times had been good instead of bad. Plus, judging from my own limited experience, selling and marketing online may not have been hit as hard as those businesses in the real world in 2008, since consumers are doing everything to save a penny and shopping online has become a much cheaper alternative for many.

As we enter into these uncertain times, online marketers and webmasters need all the help they can get. Recently, Google mailed a small booklet to its Adsense users; in it Google gives “6 Top Tactics For Tough Times.” It is obviously referring to its Adwords PPC (Pay Per Click) program and clients but Google’s advice can be applied to your own general online marketing.

These tactics include: (quoting directly from the Google mail-out)

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings.

2. Use Value-related keywords.

3. Ensure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.

4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.

5. Make it easy for customers to buy.

6. Focus your money on your high-performers. (End Quote)

Sound advice and I especially like the idea of focusing your marketing on low prices and savings mainly because people want bargains in tight economic times. I also like the fact that you must make it easy for your customers to buy… something as simple as putting your “order/buy link” above the fold can increase your conversions.

Also, targeting value-related keywords, is a very effective marketing tactic. Relating your keywords to “discounts, bargains, cheap, inexpensive, lowest prices…” will help increase your sales. So too, is catering to phrases that suggest the searcher is in a buying mind-set: gifts, presents, gift ideas, wedding gifts… shoppers searching those words are ready to buy.

Plus, focusing your time and money on your high-performers is solid advice. Sometimes succeeding online is simply finding a market niche that works/performs – then running with it. Once you have found the keywords and products that perform well with your site or sites – focus the majority of your time and energy developing those niche markets.

Now here are some of my most effective marketing tactics that have worked for me and tactics I will be relying on in the coming years – even in these hard times.

o Make Keywords Your #1 Goal

This is the single most important factor for my own online success. You have to make keywords and ranking high for them in all the search engines your main objective if you’re marketing online. Might sound obvious, but many beginning marketers don’t truly understand how important getting top rankings for your chosen keywords will be in your online success.

Target less competitive long tail (multi-worded) keywords to get started and slowly work your way up to more popular keywords. Center your marketing around getting those first page listings (Top Five) for your keywords. Achieve this goal, (especially in Google) and it will be almost impossible for you not to succeed and make a profit with your online marketing even in bad times.

o Autoresponders, List Building & Online Relationships

Keeping in contact with potential buyers is mission critical. You must use autoresponders to send follow-up messages to build trustful relationships with your potential customers.

So building a large contact list is essential. That’s why the social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace can be very effective marketing tools for building this online contact and trust. Truth be told, all these social networks are, more or less, just glorified autoresponders and list builders!

o Your Unique Selling Position

You must give potential customers some very good reasons for them to buy from you or your links. Offering special bonuses and discounts works wonders for your sales. Some of my most successful pages simply consists of coupons and discounts offered by different companies. If buyers can save $100’s OFF by buying thru your links, they will.

Always remember, besides looking for the best deal or bargain, consumers are also looking for a quality product. If you’re into affiliate marketing, only pick top quality products to promote. Picking top brand names also makes it easier to make sales. So too is only promoting popular online merchants like Amazon, can be an effective marketing strategy. Most importantly, always remember consumers are also looking for INFORMATION on the products they are considering buying, give them helpful information and you will succeed.

o Go With The Flow

If you’re marketing online, you have to follow what’s working for you. Most times you will try countless ideas or tactics – once you have found a process or system that works, really work it or scale it up. Making your first dollar is the hardest, but once you do something that earns you that dollar, just repeat that “something” a thousand times.

Tracking what works is very important so keep a close eye on your site’s traffic logs to find where your customers are coming from. Something like Google Analytics is simply priceless for “fine-tuning” your site and your online marketing. It will tell you what’s working and what’s not.

o Target Recurring or Residual Income

One of my most effective marketing strategies is to promote and sell products and services that give you a recurring or residual income. Make one sale and get paid for years or for the life of that referred client. Concentrate on services like web-hosting, telephone, marketing programs… once customers sign up to these services, they will likely keep them for years. I am still earning income from sales I made five years ago.

Building a large residual income could be the key to surviving in tough economic times. This will be income which will carry you or your business over the rough patches since it is based upon past performance and not on your current selling situation.

o Automate Everything

The real beauty of marketing online and using computers… you can automate just about every process in your marketing system. Make it a point of automating everything you do… use autoresponders to follow-up with potential buyers, use automatic check-outs, automatic reporting… just set-up your whole online marketing system that runs itself with little or no supervision from you. This will free up your time to concentrate all your efforts on marketing/promoting your site or product. Besides, nothing beats coming back from a vacation and finding out you have earned the cost of your vacation and then some – all the while you were lying in the sun and miles away from any computer.

o Find The Top Online Marketers

If you’re just starting with online marketing, you need to find the top successful marketers and “model” what they’re doing. This is relatively a new industry and you have to seek out the experts and pioneers who have set the groundwork. When I first started marketing online, I was quite fortunate to come into contact with some web marketing heavy-weights such as Marlon Sanders, Ken Evoy, Neil Shearing… and SEO experts like Brad Callen and Aaron Wall.

o Make Google Your Friend

Whether you love or hate Google doesn’t matter, you just have to make it your number one ally in your online marketing. Google has just about conquered the world-wide search market, Yahoo and MSN are still important, but Google is the deal-breaker when you’re selling stuff online. Consumers have enormous respect for Google, a number one listing for a lucrative keyword simply means money in the bank.

I have found using Google Search, Google Adwords, and Google Adsense have played a more than significant role in the success of my own online sites and marketing. Google tools such as Google Analytics, Google Alerts, Webmaster Tools… all have been invaluable and an enormous help in achieving my “web-based” lifestyle and livelihood. Of course, Google has also driven me around the bend more times than I can count, but no one is perfect. Besides, when it’s all said and done, anyone marketing on the web must truly embrace Google if they want to reach their highest level possible.

SEO… Know anything about it? Well for one, SEO is considered to be among the newest of the many forms of Internet Marketing. And, it’s also considered to be among the most popular trends in internet marketing. But why is it that SEO still frightens a lot of us? Although SEO is one of the most popular, many of us still considers “It” as among the most complicated strategy for internet marketing.

But you know, despite the techno-R2-D2 dialect things that the dudes from an SEO department throws at you such as SEMs, Page Ranks, Keyword stuffing or density, Algorithms, SERPs, Alt Tags, Anchor Texts, Inbound or Outbound Links… SEO is as simple as it gets. It’s as simple as it’s called – Search Engine Optimization, and all you have to do is to optimize the website for search engines to find it easily. The only thing about it is that it involves a lot of work. But if you look at it on a different point of view, it’s quite enjoyable.

But what does SEO do actually? Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche – you’ll naturally want your site or content to be at the top of the líst. That is what SEO does for your website. Keeping the traffic in and letting it do that for as long as the website stands. Now, isn’t that a good thing?

To let you know what SEO companies do on an SEO campaign, let me give you the top 5 techniques and tactics that the dudes from an SEO Company usually do on their campaigns.

Keyword Research

Knowing your keyword is very important to achieve the highest rank in search engines. SEO Companies usually use software tools such as Wordtracker and Seobook to research for their keywords. These tools give them a rudimentary number of searches. Relevance is also very important in keyword researching. The design of a website must be relevant to its keyword. Another thing that SEO Companies do is doing some deep-linking to these pages on their sites. SEO companies usually find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to their home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition is something to consider as well. This way, it’ll be a lot easier to achieve higher rank.

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On-Page SEO

On-page optimization and web design factors play a very major role in SEO campaigns. These are the first things that search engines look for in a website. It’s important for an SEO company to make sure that their website is as SEO friendly as it can. Also, SEO companies make sure that all of their pages are easily reachable from their homepages. This is easily done by a strategy called navigation bars or menus. Navigation bars lead to other webpage in a website.
Sitemaps also play significant roles in SEO. SEO companies generate XML sitemaps and upload them to their website. This technique makes the search engines very happy, because this makes it a lot easier for search engines to crawl your website through that.

SEO companies prioritize website’s title and description as well. The title and description should contain some of their selected keywords. Dudes from an SEO Company also make sure that they use them to draw and attract interested visitors to their site and content, and not just the search engine. They also make sure that their title and URL contain keyword relevance for maximum effect. Having some of their major keywords in a domain name also makes this a lot easier for search engines to visit their website.

Want to make it to top 10 in a search engine? Then visit SEO Philippines at www.myoptimind.com for more details.

Link Building

There are many strategies and tactics developed within the SEO, and Link Building is still the most popular and most effective way of boosting a website’s rank on any search engine. Backlinks from relevant sites are as important as the keywords themselves. An SEO company makes it their top priority to make sure that the ‘anchor text’ is related to their keywords, while making sure that the text and overall quality of the content linking to their site is relevant. These guys make sure that they link out to high quality, high ranked relevant sites in their niche.

Only the latest SEO strategies and tactics can be served by SEO Philippines. Visit SEO Philippines at www.myoptimind.com.

Article Marketing

Article marketing, though not as effective as link building, is still a well-established way of getting some quality backlinks or inbound links. Doing a 500-800-word article with backlinks included within the article itself or on the resource box is still an effective method to receive a lot of traffic. Longer, more informative articles also work for many SEO companies. This is by using intensive network of press releases and distribution in article submission sites like SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters, and other major online press release sites. While doing all that, SEO companies still make sure that they’re also talking to users, users whom might become their clients. So these guys make use of their imaginative juices to make their article SEO-friendly and reader-friendly.

Blogging and Social Media

Search engines are inlove with Blogs. Blogs are the most favorite spot that search engines visit. Newly updated entries, articles, live comments, and chain of communities, these blogs are what’s making SEO more and more fun. SEO companies usually use WordPress blog software for their blogging purposes. Most of these guys use WordPress because it’s extremely effective for SEO purposes. WordPress software is easier to install on a website even if they do not have any knowledge in installing server-side scripts. Other SEO Companies also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free blog hosts to help distribute content. Search engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging.
Social bookmarking is becoming very important on the web. Social media sites such as Friendster, MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter and media news such as Digg, SlashDot, Technorati are now among the targeted media that SEO companies use. SEO campaigns include joining these sites and using them to their advantage. Though very time consuming, SEO companies are still using this strategy because of its great benefits and conversion.
But apart from those things I said earlier, planning is still the heart of an SEO campaign. Planning is the foremost important part of an SEO campaign. In our every undertaking, planning is the least element that we would want to forget. Planning and strategizing is very important in every SEO campaign. Understanding what SEO strategy to use is integral. This way, we wouldn’t run into some major problems where we would have to resort to resetting our efforts and start again from scratch. Now, that would be very costly and time consuming.
But first, you should take into mind that SEO is not complicated. A lot of work yes, but not complicated. As I had said, with a right point of view, SEO efforts are very enjoyable, especially when it comes to blogging, article writing, link partnership, and social media efforts. When used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffíc you’re seeking. Just do what we do and you’re on your way to success.

Though there are many different theories out there regarding what makes the best SEO technique, when it comes to some issues that will work against your SEO efforts, there are some issues where everyone agrees. Among these, the most prominent are:

· Not having a web page title

· Using too many graphics, images, or flash animation on a given web page

· Having a menu system that is prohibitively complex

It is extremely important that every web page on your site has a title. Without providing a

descriptive title that is search engine optimization with the right keywords, you’ll not only hurt your ranking, but you’ll turn visitors away. Consider it the equivalent to owning a store without a sign and with blackened windows.

To make sure that you’re doing your best on that level, make certain that each web page on your

site has its own unique title that is specific to its content. Try to make sure that it includes the

primary keyword for that page, to ensure proper SEO for search engine spiders.

By using too many graphics, images, or flash animation, you may be pleasing the eye, but search engine spiders won’t see it the same way. Search engines focus on the text content of your

website. Their spiders crawl through your site looking for text, keywords, and other indications

of purpose.

They cannot, however, understand images or flash animations, nor will they ever understand their appeal. Therefore, though images are great ways to add appeal to your visitor’s adding too much to any given web page, you’re decreasing the value of your search engine optimization.

To reduce this problem, try to create a balance on your page where the text content is given the true priority, and images, graphics, and flash animations are only a compliment, not a focus for the page. You can also help your website by adding alt tags to each of your images so that you are providing the search engine spiders with a bit of text, even when it’s an image that

actually shows up on the page.

The menu system of your website is the key to being able to properly navigate around it. Search engine spiders are typically considered to be relatively basic programs and struggle with anything but the most primitive menu systems.

For example, if your menu involves JavaScript or a Java applet, the search engine spider will not be able to recognize any of the features, and will not be capable of properly navigating the site. Certainly, these can be very appealing to people, but search engine spiders don’t have the same ability to interpret the features of a website as people do.

For proper search engine optimization, a simple textual link is your best option as it is the

easiest for a search engine spider to understand. It makes your site much more likely to be seen in full by the spider, and therefore receive the best indexing and ranking results.

Furthermore, the majority of the time, an extremely complicated menu system can quickly be replicated and implemented using textual links and CSS. This will make an enormous difference in your SEO results, and will be welcomed by all of your visitors who are still using dial-up and other slow connections.

If you must use a complex menu or site navigation system, then make sure that you at least

provide a site map that is readily available via a text link from the home page. This site map

should use text to clearly link to every one of the other pages of your web site. This way, even if a spider is unable to use your regular menu system, it will be able to reach all of the pages by way of the site map.

Refraining from working against your own SEO efforts due to simple errors, and will enjoy

much larger amounts of traffic to your website.

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Jack has committed to providing relatively basic SEO Information. Please view SEO Resources to learn how to receive a free e-book and explore the 500 Dollar Internet Marketing Industry.

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