Archive for February 22nd, 2010
Craigslist
February 22nd, 2010 | 
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Are you using Craigslist to advertise for your home business? If so you are not going to achieve the results you are looking for. Yes Craigslist does have an Alexa ranking of 8 and yes Craigslist does get boat loads of traffic to it’s site. But advertising on Craigslist is not worth your time and if you are paying 25 bucks to advertise in certain cities, I will show you why it is not worth your money. With that being said if you are going to post your home business ads on free classified ad sites, Craigslist is the best. You shouldn’t even bother to post to any other free classified ad sites besides Craigslist, that is if you are going to post on free classified ad sites. There are many other ways to effectively market for your home business. One other thing to think about, if you are solely using Craigslist as a way to advertise your home business, the chances of you building a successful home business are slim to none. First off most people posting on Craigslist in the small biz section are just posting their own home business ads up. They are not looking to join up with any other home business owners. So yes posting an ad on Craigslist is very easy but it is also very ineffective. Your ad will most likely not end up helping you build your business. In order to be effective on Craigslist you must post your ads massively and to every city possible. Great problem solved, right? Nope, Craigslist has spiders who search for spammers and these spiders ban and flag the ads. What are some of the things which can get you flagged on Craigslist? Well posting the same ad to multiple cities can and will get your ads flagged and removed. Next posting multiple ads with the same IP address will get you banned permanently. Meaning any ad you post on Craigslist will get flagged before it even goes up. This happens if you spam with the same IP address, that IP address is banned for life. And it’s hard to know if the Craigslist spiders consider your ads to be spam but if they do you are done. Another issue you will have to deal with when posting to Craigslist is other home business owners flagging your ads for no reason. Somewhere in their twisted minds they believe more people will see their ads if they flag and remove other home business owner’s ads. Now true posting an ad on Craigslist here and there is easy but it is not effective. And if you are posting ads like “Earn 6 Figures Overnight”, most people are tuning those types of ads out. Now what I am suggesting will take more work but the payoff will be 100 times what you could ever imagine. Why not create your own website and learn how to market it effectively online, instead of posting a couple of ads to Craigslist. Imagine having your website located at the top of the search engines for a keyword like “home business”. How powerful would your business be if you could land that spot? Very powerful. There are plenty of keywords to go around. That is just one effective way of building your home business besides posting on Craigslist. Here is one thing I can guarantee you. The people making over 6 figure incomes from their home business are not using Craigslist to market their business.
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Are Made For Adsense Sites Ruining Search Results?
It’s happened to you. You’ve searched for something on Google and several promising results appear. You click on a link, but when you get to the site all you see are a few ads and nothing even remotely close to what you searched for. So you go back to the search results and try again, only it happens again and again until you finally find a page with some decent content…or frustration sets in and you give up all together. Why does this happen? How come in this day and age Google can’t give you the results you’re looking for? A large part of the answer is the growing number of made for AdSense (MFA) sites on the web today. MFA sites are designed for the sole purpose of getting you to click on a Google AdSense advertisement. Define Made for AdSense A site is made for AdSense if its sole purpose is to get users to click on AdSense ads. Its owners don’t intend that users will learn from its content or participate in a community. All that they want is for them to click on an ad. A site is NOT made for AdSense if its primary purpose is to provide unique content and the site owner decides to keep their content free by displaying advertisements, AdSense or other. This has been going on for years – television, newspapers, and magazines all generate revenue with advertisements. The difference is that the advertisements SUPPLEMENT the content of the show or article. The same applies for the web. If you have a news site or a forum, placing ads on your site does not make it a made for AdSense site. Why Do People Make MFA Sites? The thing with MFA sites is that they work. The overwhelming majority of the population has no clue what Google AdSense is and doesn’t understand that Google and the site owner make money when they click on an ad. By placing these ads in locations that people tend to focus on (Google gives you examples of locations that result in the highest click through), it’s inevitable that a certain percentage of visitors will click on the ads – either intentionally or unintentionally. Site owners make anywhere from a five cents to several dollars per click (revenue is split between them and Google) depending on the industry. Big deal right? If you convert 5% of users into clicks and you make 10 cents a click, you’re only making 50 cents for every hundred visitors to your site. Well if you make a thousand MFA sites and each gets two hundred visitors a day, you are making a cool $1,000/day. Smart MFA site owners design sites with keywords that advertisers pay more than the standard 20 cents or 30 cents. They design sites with “content” about lawyers and car companies that purchase AdWords advertisements that cost several dollars a click. Re-do that calculation with five dollars a click instead of 10 cents and your jaw will drop. How do they get their traffic? In addition to using conventional white hat SEO methods (like unique content and link building), many of these sites shamelessly also take advantage of keyword stuffing and cloaking – tactics that are considered unethical and are against Google’s terms of service. Many also get their clicks in unethical ways – either by clicking on ads themselves or by employing bots to automatically click. This is called click fraud and is also against Google’s terms of service. Who Gets Hurt? Some would argue that no one is getting hurt by “tricking” people into clicking. Hey they’re not getting charged anything. No, but some advertiser is. Some business that’s pouring their hard earned money into Google AdWords to attract TARGETED visitors to their site. Instead they end up paying for accidental clicks. You (the searcher) also get hurt by getting less than optimal results. Imagine an internet where these sites didn’t exist. You might actually have a chance at finding what you’re looking for on the first try. That would save you some time that I’m sure you’d be glad to have. Should Google Do Something About It? Everyone’s first thought is “Google could stop it if they tried.” In reality, probably not. Regardless of the talent they recruit, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people trying to figure out a work around. As Seth Jayson recently said in his article about the same topic entitled How Google is Killing the Internet “I think when you pit a few hundred Google Smarty Pantses — who are getting fat on stock options and gourmet meals at the Big Goo campus — against many thousand enterprising schemers on the Internet, the battle will go to those hungry schemers every time.” Google does have a system in place to reduce click fraud and are always improving their algorithm to rid their results of sites that practice cloaking, keyword stuffing, and other black hat SEO techniques. Unfortunately, it’s probably not enough. The larger (and much scarier) question is whether or not Google wants to do something about it. For the time being, they stand to make a ton of money off of MFA sites. Until Google starts to see a negative impact from MFA sites there’s really no reason for them to rush to do anything about it. Say Yahoo! all of a sudden came up with a way to identify and block MFA sites and provided better search results because of it, Google may be threatened by the potential (or actual) loss of search percentage. But until that happens I wouldn’t expect Google to do much more than they are right now. What Can You Do? There’s no doubt that MFA sites have clogged up the web with thousands of worthless pages. The best way to reduce the number of made for AdSense sites is probably to do something about it yourself. If you advertise on Google AdWords, don’t allow Google to display your ads on their content network (AdSense sites). As an internet user, you can educate others about MFA sites and encourage them not to click on ads. It may not seem like much, but all of those clicks add up – just ask someone who owns a made for AdSense site.
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Autoresponders – The Power Of Instance Access
In most traditional businesses you will likely find a receptionist who can either answer business specific questions or can route customers to the appropriate department for assistance. In more automated offices a voice mail system can alleviate much of the guesswork in locating the right department (although the process can seem a bit impersonal). Some of the larger email companies also have manned phone lines, but for many ecommerce business owners the cost of hiring a staff to man the telephones may make a business startup next to impossible. It is for this situation that autoresponders are particularly useful. Many businesses already use autoresponders to provide a key element in customer service – an acknowledgement that there is an issue to be resolved. This is followed up by a more personalized email or phone call to address the issue. Auto responders are also useful for the delivery of newsletters or an ecourse. One area that may not be as prominent, yet can be a very effective means of utilizing an autoresponder, is in information supply. How does this differ from an ecourse? An ecourse is a pre-developed series of information pieces that help the customer learn more about the product or service you provide. An information supply in the form of an autoresponder can allow customers to click on specific questions related to site use or other informational needs related to your site and receive the information they need within minutes. It’s true that you could put a link to this information on your website, but an autoresponder for some of this information may result in an increased organic list for email marketing. However, The primary reason for using extended autoresponders has to do with the ability for this process to result in improved customer service efforts. If you can find ways to assist your customers instantly you will see customers view your online business in a more positive light. I don’t know about you, but when I send a company an email seeking answers I can’t find online and I hear back from them a few days later I have already forgotten what I wanted and I’ve probably ventured on to other sites to purchase something I probably could have purchased on the original site if only I had received the information I needed in a timely manner. Autoresponders can be used for a variety of purposes and it is likely your customers will enjoy the benefits of instant information access.
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Posted in web | 
Tags: autoresponders, email marketing, internet marketing, marketing, site promotion | 
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