How to Create Niche Business Social Networking Sites

19. July 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Social Networking · Tags: , , , , ,

Social networking is the buzz word in today’s Internet space. With lots and lots of people getting into Social networking everyday, many wise online marketers are creating their own Social networking websites. However, with many online marketers getting into Social networking, it is necessary to highlight your social networking website to avoid getting lost in the crowd. For this you have to offer your users with something unique and useful.

Provide the users with interactive Social networking Softwares

Do you know the reason behind the huge popularity of the social networking websites like myspace and face book? One of the reason is that they provide some interactive, useful social networking softwares. Unlike other softwares that needs to be downloaded to the users computer (which most of them do not prefer), these social networking softwares doesn’t need to be downloaded. These web based social networking softwares are gaining popularity these days because of the ease of use. As there are no compatibility problems associated with these social networking softwares, anyone can use it.

Creating Social networking software for your own Business Social Networking Website

When it comes to creating a social networking software, you will come up with a question “Should I Build my Own Social Networks Software?” Just keep reading on to find the answer. You can create the social networking software for your website by yourself if:

1. You are a skilled programmer.
2. Have lots of time to spare to spend on researching the trends in the Social media.
3. Are able to identify the user needs and satisfy them

The users of any websites will become unpleasant if the site takes long time to load. Moreover, the error messages are the ones that make the users of your social networking website more irate. Once the error message shows up to any user of your social networking website, they will never return back to your website. If you are a no vice programmer, trying to add or build social networking softwares, then your social networking softwares will be more error prone. All of these factors will be rather overwhelming to you if you are not a skilled programmer. Yet creating your own social networking software for your social networking website is not impossible.

Getting professional help for building Social Networking softwares

There is nothing to worry even if you don’t have the above said requirements for building social networking software. The professional social networking web designers are capable of building unique social networking softwares too. There are so many ready made social networking softwares also. All you have to do is to pick the right one that best fulfils your customer requirements. Getting social networking softwares built through programmers has many advantages. It saves much of your time and money along with enabling you to offer the users of your social networking website with some great interactive social networking software.

How to Use Yahoo! Search Marketing Analytics to Improve Your Campaign Performance

19. July 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Yahoo Search Marketing · Tags: , , , , , ,

How to Use Yahoo! Search Marketing Analytics to Improve Your Campaign Performance

If you are going to be successful running Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns for your business, then you must use analytics to measure the performance of various elements of your campaigns. For instance, you need to know which keywords generate the most conversions. This will allow you to allocate your budget to those keywords that generate the highest return on investment.

To turn analytics on:


1. Log into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account.

2. Click the Administration tab.

3. Click the “Analytics” link on the sub-menu.

4. Click the blue “Enable Analytics” button.


It will serve you well to have some kind of well-defined conversion event on your web site. This gives you something to measure. If you sell products, it’s easy. You just pass the amount of the sale to the analytics, and Yahoo! will calculate how much profit you are making on your campaign. If you sell services, it’s a little more difficult. In that instance, what you need to do is assign some kind of value for having a visitor complete some action on your web site.


Conversion tracking like we are talking about here, where you can actually determine with precision the profitability of every keyword in your campaign, is accomplished by placing a snippet of JavaScript code on the page of your web site that signifies the completion of a conversion event. Examples are an order confirmation page for a web site that sells products, and a mailing list signup thank you page. Into the JavaScript code you pass the value of the transaction. So if you sell products, you would pass through the actual amount of money you made on the product. If you sell services, you might pass through a static value like every time someone signs up for your mailing list.


If you have enough data, you can more accurately assign a value to an event like a newsletter signup. For example, if you know that your average customer is worth 0 in profit, and you know that 5% of the people who sign up for your newsletter eventually become customers, then you can assign a newsletter signup a value of (0 X 5%). This means that every newsletter signup is worth in revenue, because for every 20 you will make 0 in profit. You should be able to come up with a reasonable guess about how much profit you earn on the average customer. After you have generated a few hundred newsletter signups, you will have a good idea what your average conversion rate is for newsletter subscribers.


To start tracking your campaign financially, you need to enable “Conversion Only” analytics.


To enable Conversion Only analytics, tags that record conversion events and revenue:


1. Click the radio button next to “Conversion Only Analytics”.


2. Click the blue “Activate” button.


You will see a section of the page that contains a snippet of code something like:


window.ysm_customData = new Object();

window.ysm_customData.conversion = “transId=,currency=,amount=”;

etc…


As the instructions say, you need to place the code snippet in the header section of the page on your site that represents your converting event.


If you sell items that can be different prices, such as items in an ecommerce shopping cart, you will need to have your web site administrator or programmer place some code that will dynamically insert the price. It should be appended to “,amount=” in the appropriate line of the JavaScript code snippet.


For example, if the sale is for an item that costs .95, line 4 of the code snippet above would end:


…conversion = “transid=,currency=,amount=24.95″;


If you only sale a single-priced item, or if you are a service business that is going to assume some dollar value for the converting event, you can always pass the same dollar amount through by setting the “Revenue Value:” dropdown on the Analytics Settings page to “Constant Average Value”, typing the amount in the textbox, and clicking the “Save” button. If you do this, you don’t have to worry about modifying the JavaScript code to pass the amount of the sale through.


When you activate analytics, some new columns of data are added to your campaign summary, campaign detail, and ad group detail charts: conversions, revenue, CPA (cost per acquisition), and ROAS (return on ad spend). This will show you at a glance how well your campaigns, ad groups, and even keywords are doing financially.


If you need some more detailed information about setting up analytics, such as configuring your ecommerce platform to pass revenue data to the tracking code, refer to the Yahoo! Search Marketing Analytics Setup Guide, which is a PDF file that can be downloaded from Yahoo! at help.marketingsolutions.yahoo.com.

Jerry Work is president of Work Media, LLC, a pay per click management and search engine optimization firm based in Nashville.

8 SEO Dos and Don?ts to Insure a High Page Rank

19. July 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: The High Page Rank · Tags: , , , ,

8 SEO Dos and Don?ts to Insure a High Page Rank

In search engine optimization (SEO), page ranking is very important for your campaign. Here are eight SEO Dos and Don’ts you will want to fallow in order to insure a high page rank for your site.

1. Do use specific and relevant keywords and keyword phrases.
2. Don’t overuse your keywords or use them out of context. Search engines can actually tell if a keyword is used out of context and will rank you low in a search.
3. Do use content specific titles. Make sure your content titles are specific and relevant to your products or services and they properly identify your keyword or keyword phrases.
4. Don’t link from low ranked sites. Rankings have a lot to do with how many times you are linked; however, linking from poor quality websites, ones that are ranked low or discredited, can actually hurt your rankings. That is why it is always important to link from reputable websites with high rankings.
5. Do have a lot of textual content. Search engines need textual content in order to rank relevance. Therefore, you must have text in order for a search engine to rank your site. If you have nothing to evaluate and you will be ranked low in the search.
6. Don’t use complicated toolbars and menus. Search engines cannot navigate a toolbar or menu like a human can, so if you do have complicated toolbars and menus, you should also have a site map.
7. Don’t create a Flash animation or image based site with little to no text. Though animations and images are eye catching, search engines cannot read them. Therefore, if you use animations or images, make sure you also have plenty of textual content for a search engine can read and rank.
8. Do constantly update with new content. For help with content, contact a Houston SEO service to assist you. A site that isn’t updated or changed regularly will not be evaluated by a search engine. A good strategy to keep your site updated with new textual content is to create a blog or a forum. Update with business bulletins, product or service information, or industry news.

If you follow these eight Dos and Don’ts, you will insure you have a high page rank.

Ryan Frank is a 23 year writer and blogger living in San Diego, CA.

10 Free and Easy Ways to Improve Your Alexa Ranking

19. July 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Alexa Rank · Tags: , , , , ,

10 Free and Easy Ways to Improve Your Alexa Ranking

Alexa, which is owned by Amazon.com, gives away a free toolbar that you can download and install in your browser. Alexa is then able to keep track of the sites you visit and compute the traffic ranking of those websites, with a rank of “1″ being the assigned to the most visited site.

If you want a more technical definition, Alexa explains it like this:

“The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users).”

(http://www.alexa.com/site/help/traffic_learn_more)

In April 2008 Alexa revised its methodology so as to “aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users”. (http://awis.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html)

How accurately this method reflects the actual surfing patterns of all Internet users is open to question. However, if you bear in mind that by the end of 2005 the toolbar has been downloaded well over 10 million times you will realize why many people still think that Alexa offers one of the best approximations that we have of website ranking, especially for the top 100,000 or so websites.

That is why Alexa remains an important measure of a website’s status and is used as a quick way to assess the popularity of a website by advertisers looking for the maximum exposure for the their money. Websites with a higher Alexa ranking also tend to be trusted more than those with a low ranking, so it is in the interest of website owners to get their sites ranked as highly as possible with Alexa.

Here are some quick and easy tips to help you do that without spending a single dollar!

1. Install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as your homepage.

2. Copy and paste an Alexa rank widget onto your website. You can get the widget code at http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup. As well as informing your visitors about your Alexa rank, it will also keep Alexa updated about the number of unique visitors surfing your site.

3. Create a customized version of the Alexa tool bar, Then place a link on your site to the download page and invite your visitors to download it. You will also earn Amazon commissions every time a user shops on Amazon via the toolbar link.

4. If you have a WordPress blog there is a plug-in for Alexa Ranking (wp-Alexa-redirect-0.3plug-in) that you can use.

5. Submit your site to web directories. Although a lot of directories charge a registration fee, you can still find many that are willing to list your site free of charge or in exchange for a reciprocal link. A lot of the webmasters who browse web directories have the Alexa bar installed, so if they click your link it will help your Alexa traffic rank.

6. Become an active participant on Internet marketing and SEO forums. Again, a lot of those forum participants are already webmasters and a high percentage will use the Alexa toolbar when they surf. Place a link to your site in your signature and your rank will improve when any of those people click through.

7. A lot of Asian and Australian websites feature in the Alexa top 100,000 and you can bet that a lot of website owners will have the Alexa toolbar installed, so it makes sense to join social networking sites that are popular in those regions, such as:

* http://www.orkut.com – Orkut is owned by Google and is the second most visited site in India.

* http://hi5.com – Hi5 has an Alexa ranking of 17 at the time of writing this article.

8. Become an Alexa expert and post articles that discuss Alexa ranking and SEO tips. This will attract people to your site who may be interested in downloading your toolbar, or people who have already done so. Either way, it will be good for your Alexa ranking. You could even build a whole category of articles on your website devoted to this theme.

9. Set up a freebie page on your website and post a list of useful tools to attract other website owners to your site. Include another link to your Alexa toolbar download page.

10. Get into the habit of using Stumbleupon and other bookmarking sites to spread the word whenever you post a new article on your website or blog. Set up a group of fellow website owners so that you can have run reciprocal stumbling campaigns for better results.

If you apply these ten quick and easy methods you will definitely see an improvement in your Alexa rank and you should also start to attract more traffic to your site!

Darrell Howell is an Internet Marketer and Blogger. Check out his Blog at http://www.blueridgemoney.info Sign up for a free Internet Marketing Newsletter here.

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