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Have you used articles to promote your website yet? If not, article marketing is an extremely valuable and often overlooked area of promotion that you should look into. It is possibly one of the easiest and cheapest manners to draw attention to your business as well as create backlinks.

To get started in article marketing, all you need are some writing skills or the ability to hire someone who has them. Choose topics that relate to your business and write short, but useful articles on them. For example, if you have a website that sells diapers, you could write articles on the advantages of disposable or cloth diapers, how to prevent diaper rash, etc. The articles need to be between 400-600 words long and should offer valuable tidbits and information.

Use relevant keywords in your article marketing documents so the search engines can pick them up easily. The title and first and last paragraph should contain the most important keywords relating to the story. If you utilize valuable keywords, that is ones that are often searched for, you will also gain the interest of webmasters and ezine publishers.

Now for the promotion part, the resource box. This handy little bio at the end of your article is where you are allowed to talk about yourself and your business. Keep it short, most resource boxes can only contain 3-5 lines, but that is more than enough to add what you need to. You should have one line about yourself as the author, a line or two about your business and a link to your website. That is really all you need.

So, how does article marketing help you draw traffic to your site? Well, you can give these handy, informative little articles away for free so that webmasters and anyone else looking for free content can come and copy your article, resource box and all, for use in other places. Each and every time someone uses your article on their website or blog or in an ezine, you are getting free publicity. And that is the basis of article marketing.

For widespread article marketing you can submit your articles to free article directories like Ezine Articles or other similar websites. There, webmasters and other free content-seekers will browse through the articles and pick up the ones they like and can use. The conditions of use require them to include your name as author and your bio box in every single copy of the article. This is article marketing at its finest! A decent writer can whip off a few articles in an hour and they will continue to produce backlinks and promote your product for years!

For more specialized article marketing, you might consider offering articles exclusively to one or two websites that fit your theme. Simply write a brief email with the article included, explaining that you would like to offer use of your article, along with a link to your site for free. If you are only offering this opportunity to one website, mention that it is a unique offer and the webmaster will be more likely to take you up on it.

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If you are like hundreds of thousands of people around the world, you are looking for a good way to earn money online. Everyone looking into online business opportunities comes across affiliate programs at some point or another, but only a few actually rise to the level where they are earning decent money, the majority quit before getting to that point.

Affiliate programs are like any other business; they require patience and hard work in order to make it work. Far too often, it is promoted as the ideal way to earn instant cash, which is just not true. In order to earn in affiliate programs, you need to plan for at least a year of low to nothing earnings. Perhaps you will actually earn more, but don’t go into this opportunity expecting to get rich overnight. That being said, you can certainly improve your chances with a few tips.

Build yourself a trustworthy reputation. There are hundreds of other people out there promoting the same affiliate programs links for products and services. People know what an affiliate programs link looks like and will go out of their way to not give you a commission if they think you are only in it for the money. So, to stand out from everyone else, you need to build yourself a reputation.

The best way to go about doing this is to establish a presence in your niche area. This can be anything you choose. Internet marketing is generally not a good idea, since that is the first niche most people head for. Let’s say you decide to focus on herb gardening. Instead of starting up a website to sell a variety of affiliate programs products, start off by writing a blog and offering good, quality information . . . for free!

That’s right, free. You might think this is a bit counter-productive, but remember that you are not going for the fast buck; you want people to keep giving you money and recommending their friends to give you money as well. When they see that you are not only doing this for the money, but to genuinely help people, readers will begin to send more people your way.

Once you have established your reputation as a guru or high quality information provider in your chosen area, you are ready to start monetizing. This could take up to six months to really get people to trust you, so be prepared. Then you can begin to recommend tried and true products that you think would help your readers. Don’t be afraid to throw in non-affiliate programs links as well, to keep things clean. The worst thing a blogger or webmaster can do is to switch from being helpful and free to suddenly trying to make money fast, at the expense of fans.

By following these steps and taking care not to fool your clients, you can make a living at affiliate programs. It is a good way to earn money while doing something you love and providing useful information to others.

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Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

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I am always looking out for new ways for my readers to make more money online with less effort.

Recently I came across a new innovation that you need to hear about because it may affect the way you earn with your website in the very near future.

As you may know, major television networks are in trouble because their advertising revenue is dropping. They are losing market share at a dramatic pace.

For the first time in history, website owners are sharing in the ad revenue that was formerly spent with the giant TV networks.

Advertisers like Harley Davidson, HBO & Taco Bell are willing to pay you on 100% of your website traffic to make up for the loss of viewers that the big TV networks are experiencing.

Do your online business a huge favor. Stop what you are doing for just a moment and learn how you can earn revenue on 100% of your website traffic.

This is a FREE opportunity that is taking the advertising community by storm!

This is bigger than radio, television and all other forms of media combined!

Get full details by clicking here!

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One of the first things I do when I begin implementing a site is to force the www (or no-www) in the domain name. Why would I want to do this? For search engine optimization of course. For example, programimi.com redirects to www.programimi.com. What this means for Google is that it gets crawled as one site. Sites that link to programimi.com will add to the pagerank of www.programimi.com. Theoretically, this could double your Pagerank score (but not necessarily your Pagerank rating).

Anyway, here is the code to add to your .htaccess file to force www, but make sure mod_rewrite apache module is turned on:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.programimi\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.programimi.com/$1 [R=301,L]

And here is the code to force no-www (in spirit of no-www.org):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.programimi\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://programimi.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Of course, replace programimi.com above with your own domain name. To edit your .htaccess file you may need to enable view hidden files, or if the file doesn’t exist, you’ll have to create it yourself. The best way is to do it through an SSH connection to your server.

If you don’t have access to .htaccess, you could also accomplish the same thing through php with a simple script at the top of every page that will try to find www in the URL and redirect if found. Not the most elegant solution, but it does what it needs to do for those who can’t edit .htaccess for some reason.

if(!substr($_SERVER[’HTTP_HOST’], ‘www’)) //check if www exists in URL
{ header(’Location: http://www.programimi.com/’); //redirect to www.programimi.com
}

Or for those using wordpress, you could simply install a plugin that does all this for you! One example plugin is WWW-Redirect.

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When Google first introduced Adsense, it was a virtually unknown element. The few webmasters who began using it made a lot of money in those first few months. However, now Adsense is so common, you see it repeated various times on every webpage!

Have we become immune to the lure of Adsense? Some webmaster say yes, others claim that they are still earning well using Google’s system. It all boils down to how you use this tool.

Making Adsense blend into your page is supposed to be the best way to earn with it, but now webmasters are discovering that this might not be ideal. People are accustomed to clicking on electric blue links. We all do it and now that everyone is so web-savvy, they automatically look for blue links. So if your webpage features pink or green links, you should consider keeping Adsense links blue. The rest of the ad can match your theme, just make sure that people realize the links are clickable.

Placing ads where they can’t be missed is another technique that is not always used to the best effect. For example, an Adsense banner at the top of your page might make sense since it is the first thing people see, but you also have to take into account how jaded folks are. We see these banners everywhere. We came to your site for specific information and the banner is in the way!

Instead, why not try putting a block of text ads or a vertical banner to the right hand side of the page where it draws the eye but doesn’t stop the reader from getting the information they came to get.

Another useful place to put your Adsense ads is at the bottom of your page as well as in the middle of an article. If you do place a block in the middle of an article, make sure people know that the information continues below and don’t make the block too big. A line of text ads or a small box are all you need.

Placing ads at the end of your article is a good way to get clicks from people who want to know more on the topic. If you have a decent article, seeded with relevant keywords, you should have ads that your readers will find useful at the bottom of the page.

Having well-written content that contains around 5-10% keyword frequency is often the best way to make sure you have relevant ads. Having relevant ads is the key to getting clicks!

Make sure you don’t use any techniques that Google deems inappropriate or you will lose your account and that will be the end of all earnings! This includes clicking on your own Adsense or asking others to. It is not a good idea to try and cheat, since Google has eyes everywhere. One hint that you might not be playing by the rules and “Adios, Adsense!” So stick to real techniques instead!

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Normally, if you want to have professional designers custom build your site, you must be prepared to dish out at least a few hundred dollars. All this can change if you know where to find the best deals, the best designs for the lowest price. Here’s a rough guide:

First, you must understand that it is a rip off to get companies to design websites for you. Have you ever seen those advertisements in newspaper classified ad sections that offer a 5-page website at $500? These companies are established companies with physical locations, therefore they have to increase the amount they charge to pay off some overheads: office rent, designer’s wages, advertising costs and so on.

Therefore, it would be wise to find freelance designers who work from home. These people are often working from home so they do not have a high operation cost like that of a company. On the other hand, they will be able to design images with quality similar to those of designers from big companies, so it’s a “no-brainer” choice.

However, choose freelancers with care. The best way to do this would be to go to elance.com. There, you can post the abstract of your project and get thousands of freelancers to bid on your project, so you will surely get the best deal. On top of that, you will be able to choose the designers based on their experience, past transactions and ratings, so your value for money is secured.

Another route you can take is to design your website yourself. Think about it, if you only need 5 simple pages to present some simple information, why waste hundreds of dollars for it? Just spend a little time to sit down and do it yourself. You’ll be able to design your own sites even if you do not know a single line of HTML code with the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on.

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Podcasting is a relatively new method of delivering radio to listeners with internet access. This free method of listening to your favorite radio show is becoming increasingly popular as more and more people learn about it. Podcasting is usually commercial free, which is another reason for its popularity.

Podcasting is also extremely popular because you choose when and where you want to listen to it. You can also decide which episode you want to hear and have a choice of listening to the podcasting episodes on an iPod (where this distribution form got its name from), a computer or any MP3. The flexibility of podcasting has catapulted it into the public’s attention.

In order to get started downloading podcasts, you need to download a podcatcher program. This allows your computer to automatically download podcasting episodes of your favorite radio shows which have been converted into digital audio files. There are several podcatchers, with the most popular being Apple’s iTunes which is also a searching device for new and interesting podcasting. You can use it to find more radio shows that you might be interested in listening to.

Other podcatchers that are free include Juice and Odeo. Both of these podcatchers also have podcasting search engines built in so you find new radio shows to download. Once you have a radio show that you wish to listen to, you can subscribe to the RSS feed so that your podcatcher can download the radio shows without you having to go to the radio website each time a new episode is released. This saves incredible amounts of time and is quite easy to use, as all the podcatchers have an easy to use interface that allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds with just the click of a button.

Once you have set up your podcasting preferences, you don’t have to worry about anything except searching for new and more interesting podcasting feeds. It is very easy to discard or erase any shows that you no longer enjoy and since all the episodes of your favorite radio shows will be saved on your computer, they are able to be accessed or downloaded to your iPod or MP3 player for easy listening whenever you wish. Unsubscribing from any podcasting broadcast is quite easy as well and you can quickly find new shows to replace the ones you delete.

There are various websites dedicated to podcasting where you can find information and new podcasts as well as fellow radio fanatics who are more than willing to share their favorite radio show feeds with you. Among the more popular are Podcasting News and Podcast as well as Podcast Alley. You can find podcasting forums on all of these websites as well as featured radio shows, both popular and lesser known. It is a good opportunity to find something new and unique for your personal radio programming.

Podcasting is still growing in popularity as it is a fairly new technology. It has great potential though and will probably continue to improve and expand over the years to come, so go ahead and jump in now.

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You see banner advertising everywhere online. They are those wide picture bands that stream across the top of WebPages, or down the sides, claiming that you can change your life by clicking on the photo. The great thing about banner advertising is that you, the average webmaster, can earn money with them!

There are a few different ways to bring in the cash with banner advertising. The first is to take on paid advertisers. These are companies that pay you to have their banner on your webpage. They provide you with the code and you place the banner advertising on your website. The price often depends on the placement of the ad on your page. For example, the highest payment would come from a banner ad at the very top of your page since this is where most people look first. A banner at the bottom will not earn you as much.

Banner advertising from third parties pay in one of two manners, per click or per impression. Pay per click is slightly higher than per impression. This is due to the fact that you could have a million page hits and only three or four clicks on the banner ad. However, although higher in pay, the pay per click program requires that your visitors actually take an action upon seeing the ad, or you receive nothing. For this reason, some webmasters prefer the pay per impression. Every time the page loads with the ad on it, you receive a small amount of money.

The second method of earning money is to promote affiliate programs through banner advertising. This requires that you sign up for as an affiliate for a product that you want to promote. You will be given the necessary codes to place the banner you choose (there are often several options) on your WebPages.

Affiliate banner advertising can be very productive in the way of earning, but they are more difficult to earn with. To get your money from the average affiliate program, you must have visitors that not only click on the banner, but perform a specific action upon being transferred to the ads website. This usually means buying a product or signing up for more information or paying for a membership of some sort. Obviously, many people will click the banner, but never pay a dime, leaving you with nothing.

With affiliate banners, you can actually write a review on your website, directing people to the great offer within the banner ad. This will raise the possibilities of having your visitors actually complete the offer. If they do, you will earn far more than simple third party ads. Affiliates often pay up to hundreds of dollars, depending on the product they are selling.

The last type of banner advertising is from Google Adsense. These pay you per click, with the rate depending on the popularity of the keyword. Adsense is a rather complicated subject and it is best to research it before using.

Banner advertising is a great way to add a bit of extra income to your website and they are free to set up, so there is no reason why you shouldn’t start putting them on your site today!

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Link popularity is a common term that is used with internet marketing. It basically means how many links to your website from other sites on the internet there are. There are various ways to measure this and this article will help you make sense of them.

Link popularity is important to all webmasters. It determines where you rank on the search engine pages for your keywords and can be absolutely vital in getting that coveted number one space on Google! While other factors are included in the equation, link popularity definitely figures high on the list and you should do your best to increase your incoming link as much as possible.

First of all, if you just want to check and see how many other ranked sites are linked to you on any particular search engine, you can simply enter “link:” (minus quotation marks) followed by the URL of your website and hit Enter. This will quickly turn up a basic link popularity count for you and is a good indication of the number of links you have from other areas.

It is important to note that you will get different results from different search engines because each search engine ranks link popularity according the links that it personally knows about. So if a website that links to you has made it onto Yahoo’s list, but not Google’s, it will only appear as a link in your link popularity rating when you do a search on Yahoo. On Google, you will be at least one link down.

Also, there are filters that may prohibit backlinks from being counted toward your site. This can affect your link popularity rating as well, changing it from search engine to search engine. It can also change with time, as the search engines are constantly adjusting their filters and requisites for link popularity.

PageRank, by Google is a basic form of link popularity, ranking sites from 0 (no link popularity) to 6 (amazingly high link popularity) must be taken with a grain of salt because of the above. There are most likely many sites that link to you which are not yet listed on Google and have not been spidered. They will not show up on your PageRank number until Google has checked them and only then if they are not banned by the filtering system which is notoriously difficult to get through on Google.

There are special freeware and shareware programs such as Link Popularity Check 3.0.3. You can install these on your computer and check your link popularity at any point with the click of a mouse. Or, if you prefer not to download anything, you can find several link popularity counters online. Some can even be set up right on your website, to display your link popularity stats to the public. This is only recommended if you happen to have fairly high ratings, otherwise, you are simply advertising that you are not very popular!

Link popularity is fairly easy to check and it is worth keeping an eye on after any promotional campaign. This way, you can see which marketing techniques boost your ratings more and continue only with the successful ones.

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