RSS Feeds – Let Us Learn the Facts

What is RSS? To begin with, it’s one of those things everyone says is easy to understand. However it is not so.

The easiest way to explain it is to make you understand a live example. We are not trying to explain everything on the subject, but this should help get you started.

Let’s sign you up for the Excess Voice RSS Feed

If you want to read the Excess Voice newsletter every two weeks you can either read it in your email inbox, or read it in your web browser.

You already know how it works when you subscribe to a newsletter via email. You sign up, hope the spam filters don’t block some or all issues, and then read the newsletter in your email program.

With RSS, instead of subscribing via email, you subscribe via a web page.

Let’s walk through the subscription process

If you have a Yahoo! account, or even if you don’t have one you can go to My Yahoo! and click the Add Content page. On the right side of the ‘Find Content’ area you will see a link, Add RSS by URL. Follow that link and, to add the Excess Voice RSS feed, simply paste this url in the field option, http://www.excessvoice.com/excessfeed.xml (Don’t click on this link. Cut and paste it.).

Now click the Add button and you’re done.

If you don’t use Yahoo!, register at Bloglines.com and follow the same process. Bloglines is a free service preferred by many users.

What happens now?

Now, whenever you go to My Yahoo! or Bloglines, you will see when the Excess Voice feed has been updated. In Yahoo it tells you how many hours or days ago the search rss feeds was updated. In Bloglines the feed name will appear in bold, and a number displayed after the name tells you how many items the feed has been updated since you last checked. (Bloglines is one such service.)

What you see…

When you check the Excess Voice feeds, you will see that with each feed, you don’t get the complete content…you don’t see the whole newsletter, the complete article or the whole review. You see the title and the first ten lines of the content. If you want to read the whole article, for example, click on the link and then it will navigate to the page on the Excess Voice site.

Online Paid Advertisements – Know the Facts before You Take the Leap

Online Paid Advertisements

Online paid advertisements are advertisements placed by online advertising networks on webmasters WebPages with permission of the webmasters, so that the viewers of the website may click on the adverts and the webmasters get paid for ads when any visitor clicks over the advertisement. This is fiscally highly profitable for the webmaster – who owns the website. There are many programs that offer this kind of novel income opportunity. The webmasters get paid for ads that have been clicked by visitors to his site.

Types of Online paid advertisements

Online paid advertisements come in different formats and shapes, starting from banner ads. Other formats include pop-up ads, pop-under ads, text ads, and news letter ads. Each online paid advertising format is unique by itself, i.e., every ad format has its special purpose. Looking to each format in detail will give a clearer picture.

Banner Ads

Banners ads, as the name implies is a banner that has ads within it. There are different types of paid banner advertising. Some of the standard formats are horizontal banner – leader board (480×60) and vertical banner – skyscraper (120×600). Other formats include half banner (234×60), button (125×125), wide skyscraper (160×600), square (250×250), large (336×280) and small rectangle (180×150). The webmaster can choose to display between image ads and text-only ads on his/her webpages. If he/she likes to display image ads, then it will cover the entire banner. But if one would like to display text-only ads, you may have from a minimum of one text ad to four or five text ads within the banner. Banner ads are also displayed in paid email advertising.

Pop-up Ads

Using Pop-up ads is a very conventional form of online paid advertising. Whenever a webpage loads, a pop-up also emerges. Before a visitor can see the webpage he has to view the pop-up -provided by the online advertising network. The online paid advertising networks such as Adsense, and Adbrite -, provide small HTML codes that can be into host webpages.

Pop-under Ads

Pop-under ads are ads that are displayed when an user visits a website, but unlike pop-ups these ads tend to stay minimized so that the visitor does not get annoyed. On closing the active window, then pop-under ads will be displayed. This type of advertising is gearing up pace in the online advertising market, as it is quite non-intrusive and doesn’t irritate the visitor or internet user. Many online advertising networks are currently offering pop-under ads and the webmasters are paid reasonably well when compared to pop-ups.

Competitor Analysis and Marketing – Where are Your Competitors?

Before the internet, there were a series of tools designed for comparing yourself to your competition. A competitive market analysis was a must for any company that wished to maintain themselves in the market.

As in the field of battle, if you don’t know what your enemy is doing, then you are lost. Information is the weapon of our modern era. And the only way to have it in the world of business is with a competitive business analysis.

What Is An Online Competitor Analysis?

A traditional competitor analysis is a tool where a series of factors are pre-established. That way, you only need to fill in the required data or information and you will obtain a result of the analysis.
In the case of an online competitor analysis, it’s almost the same thing, but adapted to the world of the internet. You will be able to measure the pros and cons of your competition. That way you can design and implement a strategy for attacking them and gaining their share of the market.

Purpose of an Online Competitor Analysis

The main importance of an online competitor analysis is that it is able to determine what are the strengths and weaknesses of your competition. That way you will be able to attack it in those points where it won’t be able to react quickly enough. And, knowing its strengths, you can benchmark (compare) them with yours.

Another factor to be taken in account is how effective is the website of your competitor. Designing an adequate webpage isn’t an easy task. It requires a good balance between content, images, colors, animation and sizes. Nobody wants a webpage full of text with no images. And no one wants a webpage where you can only see photos of the company but no information on their products.

Additionally, it’s good to know how often your competition updates its content. Why? Because it tells you how much they care. An updated site with detailed content means that your competition places great emphasis on and invests resources in maintaining an online presence. But, if the website is outdated, or if the content doesn’t have much to offer to the potential customers, then it means that they don’t have a real interest in the online market. Either that or they are incompetent. Either way, no serious business should be done outside the internet, not if they want to maintain their position.

Ten Effective Uses of E-mail Lists

E-mail is revolutionizing the art and science of direct marketing by bringing marketers new opportunities and challenges.

Try these attention-getting ideas to make the most of your e-mail marketing:

1. Sponsor a contest. Give away prizes in order to entice prospects. The gift doesn’t have to be large or expensive, although trips and cash tend to draw the most attention.

2. Publish an online newsletter. Develop a newsletter about your business or a related topic that will interest the people with whom you want to do business.

3. Publicize special promotions or events. If you are promoting a new product, hold an open house or participate in a trade show or cobranded campaign. Use your mailing list to publicize it.

 4. Drive traffic to your Web site. E-mail, direct mail, and advertising all have a stimulating effect on your company’s Web site. Use your mailing lists to get the word out.

5. Make new product or personnel announcements and press releases. Got a hot new service? Product upgrade? Did you hire a new sales manager? Moving to a new location or changing your phone number? Mailing lists are the perfect way to distribute this type of information. Give your customers advance notice of what’s coming, and let the trade press know what’s happening.

6. Offer discounts. Everybody loves a bargain, and you can use your mailing list to alert customers and prospects to your latest deals. When the discount is offered exclusively to the mailing list, you communicate the feeling that your customers receive special privileges.

7. Solicit surveys. Mailing lists are an easy way to solicit participants for a survey and to communicate survey results. Send out the questions. Tally up the responses. Report back the results. Readers appreciate having their voices heard.

8. Care for customers. Stay in touch with clients, cheaply and quickly. Thank them for their business. Ask their opinions about your service, your products, your Web site. “What can we be doing better to ___________?” You may not like everything you hear, but creating a dialogue builds loyalty and trust.

9. Encourage participation in government, civic, and community projects. Publicize issues and meetings, and solicit public support at hearings before commissions and boards, city councils, and industry associations.

10. Tell a joke. The Internet is famous as a joke-sharing medium. Get a jump on the competition by sharing good, clean jokes with your clients. It may not make a sale today, but a good joke can help your name stick in a buyer’s mind.

The Secret “10%” of SEO Knowledge and How Information Spreads in the Search World

Things in the 10% might include:

* The names and emails of private link brokers and link sellers whose networks are still passing value.
* IP lists of the search engines’ cloak-detection bots and methods of identifying potential human quality raters.
* Ways around penalties, bans, or other search issues.
* Email access to the right people at search engines, blogs, social media sites, & large web properties.
* Access to email or online lists of effective social media voting groups.
* Methods for scalably grabbing large amounts of competitive intelligence data from the engines or other sources.
* Data on traffic, referrals, and other competitive intelligence information for big brands, sites, and verticals.
* CTRs, CPCs, CPMs, ad payouts, & conversion rates for specific keywords and phrases.
* Lots and lots of other super secret stuff.

What exactly is a Squeeze Page?

List building is an important process for every online business, and squeeze pages are one of the best tools to build your mailing list.

A squeeze page is a web page designed to do one thing and one thing only: to obtain or gently “squeeze” your visitors’ information so that you have their permission to email them with your newsletter or other information.

Most squeeze pages will convert at 30 to 50% but a really good squeeze page might convert visitors at 60% or even higher. The conversion rate will depend not only upon the design of the page but also upon the quality of the traffic coming to the page.

Here are the key components of a good squeeze page.

An Attention Grabbing Headline
Immediately under your web site title or logo you need a bold headline that grabs your visitors’ attention. It’s best to come up with two or three good headlines and then test each to see which has the highest conversion rate.

Your heading or subheading should also promise to deliver something valuable that your visitors want or need. One of the statements I have used is “Learn the Secrets of Driving Traffi To Your Web Site Like Crazy!” If your visitors believe that you will deliver what you promised, and it is something they want, then they will sign up. It’s as simple as that.

Offer a Gift
Offering a free gift such as a free report or free e-book is one of the most powerful techniques to entice people to give you their name and email. If you don’t have an e-book to give away, write one. It doesn’t need to be 100 pages. Many e-books given away like this are just 16-25 pages. Try it and watch your conversions soar.

Great Reasons to Use Google Analytics

Analytics is Google’s very own visitor tracking utility; it makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

The new Google Analytics allows webmasters to keep tabs on traffic to their site, including visitor numbers, traffic sources, visitor behavior & trends, times spent on the site and a host of other information gathered via two pieces of JavaScript embedded in the source-code. It runs quietly in the background, gathering the necessary information without any visible signs of its presence, unlike other free visitor trackers.

Although Analytics boasts all the features and statistical data to be expected from a top-class keyword analysis and statistics tracker, it also features a number of additional tools which put it ahead of the most of the pack where ease-of-use and depth-of-information is concerned. Let us have a look of those 4 great reasons that could compel anybody to use Google Analytics!

• The Map Overlay: Essentially, this feature brings up a map of the world, highlighting the countries a site’s visitors stem from. Clicking on a country produces a close-up view, along with a geographical breakdown according to the region and/or city from which visitors accessed the site. This tool in itself is invaluable for all those webmasters with geo-specific sites, concentrating on a particular catchments area.
• The Site Overlay: This is conceivably Google Analytics’ single most important feature from a webmaster’s or online business owner’s perspective, as it provides a hands-on view of visitor behavior. When clicked, ‘Site Overlay’ opens the tracked web site in a new window and, after a moment’s loading time, overlays each link on the screen with a bar, containing information about clicks to the target page and goal values reached. Since it allows the webmaster or site owner to navigate his or her site and see exactly how visitors flow through it, it is difficult to imagine a more effective tool than this as far as raising a site’s conversion rates is concerned.
• Goals and Funnels: Unless the site being tracked is an information site which does not rely on generating sales or enquiries, conversion rates are as important as sheer visitor numbers. The ‘Goals & Funnels’ feature allows users to set up specific goals for their site. It also allows the user to set up specific monetary values for each goal, and thus track the site’s financial performance and profitability during any given period of time. The term ‘Funnels’ refers to the specific path a visitor takes to reach the goal’s target page and allows the tracking of each individual path with a minimum of fuss.
• Graphical Representations: A great many visitor trackers out there will present the collected information in a certain way, be it a list, graph, pie chart, flow-chart or whatever. Whilst all these methods of presentation are of course valid, it is nevertheless a fact that most users are different, and a pie-chart is not necessarily ideal for those users preferring to work with graphs or vice versa. Google Analytics however, allows users to choose between views on many of its reports. Although this may seem like a relatively minor point, it nevertheless makes things easier, as it allows the user to work with the view he or she is most comfortable with.

Which free keyword research tool to use?

Below are some Keyword Research Tools; apart from manual tactics:

1. Overture: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

2. Word tracker: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
3. Rushmore’s Keyword RT: http://www.keywordenchanter.com/
4. Adwords Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
5. Keyword Spy: http://www.keywordspy.com/

Key metrics that reveal Site Performance!

Top 4 metrics to track Web Site Performance:

Average number of page views per user: More is usually better, but high average page views combined with a low conversion rate could mean a poor shopping cart design or the wrong product mix.

Average amount of time visitors spend on the site: If visitors are staying longer than 20 seconds (the minimum threshold you want) but still not buying, you are failing to provide enough information or incentive to make a decision.

Shopping cart abandonment rate: A high abandonment rate could mean your checkout process is too complicated or you charge too much for shipping.

Conversion Rate: Conversion rates for e-commerce sites generally fall anywhere between 0.75 and 7 percent, depending on the price point and the market.

Free Advice for Search Engine Marketers!

I read a Blog post recently that gives advice to advertisers looking for an SEM. The Blogger insists that in today’s world an SEM firm must have a solid background in global equity markets and hedge funds.Before you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars; consider the following free advice:

• Know your advertiser’s objectives. Does the advertiser want to increase brand awareness? Does the advertiser have an ROI objective? Does the advertiser have a set budget, or is the sky the limit as long as the ROI target is being reached? Finding clarity regarding goals and objectives with your client is essential to building a successful online marketing program.
• Break campaigns into focused Ad Groups. Make sure that the ads in each Ad Group are appropriately paired with the keywords. Start with the advice provided by your search engine representatives, and adjust from there, based on performance and ingenuity.
• Develop and maintain relevant ad copy and landing pages. Bid management is only one factor among several which affect ad ranking. Build compelling, relevant copy that attracts consumers to click on your ads. Keep the content up-to-date. Test copy variations in distinct Ad Groups and compare performance. Make sure that the landing pages are relevant to the copy and to the keywords.
• Use the Geo-Targeting tools provided by the search engines. Make sure the ads are appropriately targeted towards geographic regions. Don’t waste budget targeting ads towards geographic regions which don’t match your target audience.
• Use match types intelligently. Explore broad, phrase, and exact match types. For each keyword, test the various match type options. Some keyword/match type combinations may result in too many clicks that don’t convert well for you — identify these combinations and eliminate them from your program. Also use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant matches.
• Study the interaction between keywords and conversions. Just because a consumer searches for “flight to Vegas” doesn’t mean he or she will book a flight to Las Vegas. The consumer may end up purchasing a bus ticket to Yonkers. Know the profit margins associated with the various conversion types so that you can set CPA or ROAS goals accordingly. If there are wide variances in profit margin in your product mix, make sure you are using a bid management system that allows you to assign goals based on the conversions as well as the keywords.
• Make sure you are using a tracking, reporting, and bid management tool with a data accuracy policy. You need good data to make good decisions. Your technology provider should give you timely and accurate click and cost data, taken directly from the search engines. Make sure your technology provider does not use unreliable referrer data for bid management calculations.

It could go on and on, but I think you get the point. Search marketing is complex, but that’s not a good excuse to abandon common sense.