Have You Heard About The Blog And Ping Combo?

You may have a new website you want to get indexed with the various search engines at the soonest possible time. Or you may have an existing website which you want to position well in the search engine results. Or you may have a good performing website which you want to remain competitive. Whatever your reason may be, you’re sure to benefit from the blog and ping combo.

Now, you may have heard or read about this before, but your never realized how it works. Or this may be the first time you have been acquainted with this surefire technique. Regardless, much can be learned from this article as we discuss the basics and the mechanics of the blog and ping strategy.

It All Starts With A Blog

Web logs, or blogs as people have fondly referred to them in recent years, were originally designed for social purposes. People used it as online diaries where they could post their thoughts, the events of their days, their secret desires and the likes. But blogs possessed some very special qualities that internet marketers found hard to dismiss.

* Blogs figure prominently in search engine results. The first few pages of some queries would yield many blogs occupying premium spots.
* Blogs are basically free web publishing tools. A little tweaking and it could become a website of its own.
* Blogs are easy to update. Just press EDIT or PUBLISH and you’d have new content in a flash. No need to change the source code. The system will easily take care of that.
* Blogs have their own communities. Bloggers often link with one another. This is a level of connectivity that is pretty hard to come by in other mediums.

Hence, online businessmen started using blogs for marketing purposes.

The strategy goes like this:

1. Create a blog dedicated to the subject your main website is catering to. Preferably, you should create an account with www.blogger.com , because this service is owned by Google, the most widely used search engine in the World Wide Web.
2. Post regularly, and include a link to your website in majority of your messages. Also include your links with popular keywords as anchor texts.
3. Include a link to your own website on the navigation bar.
4. Just to emphasize – you have to post REGULARLY. This means at least every other day. No sweat, though. Short posts of 200 words in length would be enough.

It’s About RSS As Well

Blogs produce RSS feeds. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, a technology that would allow you to broadcast any changes on your blog to subscribed systems. This is actually the heart of the blog-ping combo. You have to learn how to syndicate your RSS feeds.

If you’re using blogger, it’s easy. Take your blog’s URL. For example, it is:

www.thisisyourblog.blogspot.com

Now, all you have to do is to add the extension atom.xml. So, it should appear like this:

www.thisisyourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

This is the URL of your RSS feeds.

Now you need an RSS aggregator somewhere which could pick up your RSS feeds. Preferably, it is a website that can be easily crawled by search engine spiders. The perfect spot for this is www.my.yahoo.com . Simply create a Yahoo account, then go to the said page. Find the ADD RSS button, then press on the same. Then paste the URL of your RSS feeds.

Every time you’d update your blog, RSS feeds would be generated and displayed in www.my.yahoo.com .

Now It’s Time To The Ping

Once your www.my.yahoo.com is set up, every time you’d post a new entry on your blog, you’ll have to go to www.pingomatic.com . Fill up the appropriate fields, then submit. This will inform a lot of blog directories that your blog has new entries. And this would drive the search engine spiders on a feeding frenzy. It’ll be a reminder for them to check out your blog come the next relevant query.

Again, you have to do this every time you will post a new entry. No exceptions!

How powerful is the blog-ping combo?

Your new website will get indexed in Yahoo within 5 days. This is guaranteed! And with Yahoo picking up your website, and with www.blogger.com being owned by Google, it wouldn’t be long until the world’s most widely used search engine would index your new website as well.

And if the blog-ping combo could do this for new websites, just think of the possibilities it could provide for older ones. Fantastic, isn’t it?

Back Selling And Cross Selling Can Provide More Income Streams For Your Online Business

Almost every online business follows a basic model. This is a tried and tested system that would allow you to effectively sell your products in the World Wide Web. It is an automated system that could act as your sales agent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even when you’re offline. Have you followed this basic model so far?

Let’s have a checklist:

* Have you pinpointed your target market?
* Have you come up with a product to sell?
* Have you created a search engine-optimized website?
* Have you promoted your website well, through article marketing, forum marketing, blogs, and outside links?
* Have you come up with a sales page for your product?
* Are you garnering enough traffic for your sales page?
* Have you integrated a follow-up system in your website?
* Have you determined a price for your product?

If you have done all these things, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t rake in some substantial earnings.

The only concern left that we have to tackle is how to sustain your profit. Surely, if you’d gather a stable stream of visitors for your web page, you’d be able to generate some sales. But you should always aim for more.

And this can be done through cross-selling and back selling.

Cross-selling involves the sale of products related to the main products you are selling. For example, you are selling an eBook on dog grooming. You could offer supportive products like dog grooming kits, dog instructional videos, and the likes. You don’t have to come up with these products yourself. You could simply look for other online businesses offering these items, and you could sign up as their affiliate. As an affiliate, you just have to refer people to the other business’ sales page, and when the visitors you have referred would decide to make some purchases, you’ll get a commission for every sale!

Back selling is slightly more complicated. It involves offering your other products at the exact points of sale. Points of sale are those moments during the instruction when your customers are most willing to purchase something. By offering them other products during these times, there is a higher likelihood that they’d buy from you! These points of sale can be broken down into:

* That moment when your customer clicks on the order button. He will be diverted to a new page for his payment details. You could include a pop-up for this page advertising your other products. Better yet, the pop-ups could even employ urgency marketing to better your chances of bagging more sales.

* That moment when your customer has just purchased a product from you. Normally, he’ll be redirected to a Thank You page. In the Thank You page, you could advertise other offers as well.

When automating your online business, do keep these in mind. If you manage to integrate cross-selling and back selling tactics in specific points of your website, you’d be able to rake in more profit! It’s as simple as that!

Do you need some products to cross promote of to offer at the backend of every deal? You could check out the many affiliate programs online. For sure, there is one which is relevant to the subject your business is servicing. Simply choose the products that complement what you’re offering, or at the very least, target the same audience your own products are aiming for. This would provide for you the greatest chance of success when it comes to the aforementioned supplements for your online sales.

How To Boost The Salability Of Your Resale Rights Products

Selling products with resale rights is a very lucrative online business. However, not everyone can success with this endeavor because of the intricacies involved with such a trading.

To ensure maximum profitability in this field, you must learn how to package your resale rights products correctly. And this involves some knowledge on the different factors that make or break resale rights marketing. Let’s take a look at them, their nature and reasons, how to avoid the perils they bring, and how to use them to come up with a resale rights package that your prospects would find very difficult to resist.

1. Exclusivity. People will be more interested to buy products with resale rights if their sale is limited to certain number of people. There are many reasons for this. Primary of these is the fact that resale rights are appealing because they would provide for the purchasers an additional income stream. But if the product with resale rights is sold to an unlimited number of people, the market would just be saturated and there will be little room to make a profit. The same is true for products with resale rights that may be sold to a limited number of people when such a number is in the hundreds if not the thousands. The best approach is to sell your resale rights products to a maximum of 50 people, though a lower number would always prove better.

2. Price. Though you are justified to sell your resale rights products for a price higher than the value of the basic package, if you sell the same for an exorbitant cost, you’d have problems effectuating some sales. As a rule, multiply the value of your basic product by three. Let this be the selling price for your resale rights product. Though, you must remember, the lower the price, the more sellable your offer would be.

3. Restrictions. Resale rights can come with restrictions. But too much of them would compromise the value of the product. You may restrict certain usages for your products for example, and this would alienate some people who would otherwise be interested with the same. The rule here is to enforce only the restrictions that would preserve the worth of your resale rights product for the benefit of your purchasers. These should be restrictions that are enforceable to all of them so that their interests would be protected from possible abuses by some of the purchasers.

4. Market life. Selling your resale rights product when it is at the end of its market life would be tough. People will find little value for it, since they would have the impression that they’ll have a hard time selling the same. To allay their fears, suggest a unique selling proposition they could use. For example, you could recommend the inclusion of valuable bonuses to increase the appeal of the product, in case they’d decide to buy its resale rights from you. Or you could recommend the inclusion of supplementary products to come up with a turnkey package that would likewise increase the offer’s salability.

By considering these factors that affect the perceived value of your resale rights product, you’d be able to develop an approach that would make your offer more attractive to potential purchasers.

Here are the steps you should try to take, in a nutshell:

* Determine the cap for the number of people who could buy your resale rights product. As we have mentioned earlier, the lower the number, the more sellable your offer would be. But the determination of the cap should go side-by-side with the viability of the profit you will be able to make.

* If you decide to sell your resale rights product to 40 to 50 people, it is advisable to peg your offer at one and one-half the amount of the basic package if it were to be sold without resale right.

* If you decide to sell your resale rights to 20 to 40 people, it is advisable to peg your offer at twice the amount of the basic package.

* If you decide to sell your resale rights to less than 20 people, you could charge up to three times the amount of the basic package.

* Prepare a special report which would help your purchasers maximize the profitability of the resale rights product they would be buying. You could do this by suggesting the employment of certain strategies that they may not have considered when it comes to reselling the product they have bought. This would also give them the impression that you’re an online businessman who over-delivers, which would be great for branding purposes.

* Offer a post-sales service. This is not limited to merely technical matters about the product. It may include consultancy sessions that would help them earn some income from the reselling of the product they have purchased from you.

It’s all about the packaging. The conditions surrounding the resale rights product you have prepared may not be favorable for your behalf, initially, but with some hard work and clever thinking, you’d be able to turn the tide to your advantage.

How To Create Your Own Information Product

If you have been dabbling with internet marketing for some time now, you’re most probably aware of the fact that information products are one of the easiest and most profitable things that your could sell online. Information products may be eBooks, special reports or articles which you could offer for a price.

Preparing information products is quite easy, at least in theory. All you need are two things:

1. Information; and
2. Writing skills

Information is the hottest commodity in the World Wide Web. This is why the Internet is called the information superhighway. If you’d be able to provide the right kind of information, you will never run out of potential customers. This is especially true if you manage to find a hungry market where the demand for such information would be immense.

Writing an eBook is very similar to writing a special report. An eBook is work composed of approximately 30 or more pages. Anything shorter would be considered as a special report. Here are some simple steps you could take to come up with an information product of this type:

1. Select a topic from the niche you have previously chosen. This topic must correspond to a particular aspect of the niche, something that people would want to know about. For example, in our running example of dog grooming, supposing you choose the niche of shih tzu dog grooming, a good topic to write about is “how to select perfect grooming kits for your shih tzu.”

2. Prepare an outline for your work. It should be as organized as possible. Start with the most basic concepts, and gradually proceed to the more advanced ones.

3. Do your research! This is very important. If you’re offering something in exchange for your prospective customers’ hard-earned money, you should give them something valuable. A well-researched work is what they deserve.

4. Fill up your outline with the necessary information. If you have a great outline, this shouldn’t be a problem. All you have to do is to write about what you have researched and include them in the specific portions allotted by the said outline.

5. This is very important: avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism could ruin you. You need to learn how to respect intellectual property rights when you’re doing business online. There are no ifs and buts about it. You need to come up with an original work to sell.

6. Once you have finished the draft of your eBook or special report, have it proofread for errors. Make corresponding corrections.

7. Once you have your error-free manuscript, you would need to come up with an attractive and attention-grabbing eCover for your work. People always say that no one should judge a book by its cover. This is rarely practiced however. Many books, and many eBooks, are sold on the basis of their covers alone. Invest on a good eCover to boost your sales.

8. Then you would have to convert your work into .pdf format. Being in .pdf format would allow more people to read your eBook, as a variety of computer platforms recognize this file type.

Once you have completed these steps, you will own an information product that is ready to be sold!

But what if you are not possessed of writing skills, or you simply don’t have the time to write? Does this mean that you can’t come up with your own information product? Most definitely not, of course, as there are many ways to skin the cat, in a manner of speaking. For starters, you could always try outsourcing, or contracting the services of an outside party to help you prepare the information products you have in mind. Another option is to make good use of private label rights, better known as PLR in the industry today. Products sold with PLR would allow the purchaser to alter their contents and even name themselves as the author of the works.

There is no excuse why you couldn’t come up with your own information product. If the internet promises to be your ride to a good life, then an information product, quite surely, is your ticket to hop aboard that freight train.

How To Get Your Website Indexed By Google Within 7 Days

What was once considered as impossible is now a very real probability. Yes, your website can be indexed in Google’s database within a week’s time after it goes live! How are you supposed to do this?

Google said that you should not bother to submit your website to them. They will find your website, and once they do, they’ll index your web pages. The reason behind this is quite simple. Google uses links to hop from one website to another. If they arrive at a page that is unfamiliar to their database, they will index it… and thus is the method by which your very own website can be a part of their database.

The problem is, there are literally billions of web pages out there. Even with the mechanical precision by which it operates, it will take weeks, if not months, before Google can stumble upon your website for proper indexing. The trick is in expediting this process. And how are you supposed to do that?

Let’s put it this way. If only one website is linking to yours, Google has to crawl through that site before it could discover yours. 1 in 1,000,000,000 is not a favorable ratio. But what if you have 1,000 websites linking to yours? Alas! Your website would have better chances of getting indexed fast!

The number of websites linking to yours is called your link popularity. To check your current link popularity, use the tool that can be found at www.linkpopularity.com .

Regardless of what number would appear (which, chances are, would be zero if you have just published your website), we will have to build your link popularity to at least a thousand so that Google can find your website within a week’s time.

How are we to do this?

Here are some specific steps you should follow.

1. Write 10 highly informative and unique articles about the topic of your website.

2. If you can’t write articles, as such would require a lot of time, hire a freelancer to do it for you. Go to www.rentacoder.com , www.elance.com or www.guru.com and advertise a job. You’ll receive some bids, and it’s up to you to select the best freelancer for the task you want done.

3. Submit these articles to as many article directories you could find. The ones you shouldn’t miss are www.exinearticles.com , www.goarticles.com and www.isnare.com . Being linked via the latter option has been known to work well with MSN rankings. There are more than a thousand prominent article directories today. If you have one article in each of their databanks, then you’d have a thousand pages linking to your website.

4. Create a blog at www.blogger.com . Choose the default hosting option, that is, allow Blogger to host your blog. Blogger is owned by Google. You see the point we’re driving at here? Make sure that your blog would link to your main website, either as a mention in your posts, or as a fixed link on your menu bar.

5. Link to as many blogs as possible. Chances are, the owners of those blogs would link to your blog as well, and the readers of those blogs may even do the same thing.

6. There are sure to be some forums devoted to the subject of your website. Find these forums and create an account with each of them. Use the tool at www.link-advantage.com/search to find the online community related to the subject of your site. Once you’re a member in those forums, include a link to your website in the signature box that would be provided for. Your signature box will appear in every post you will make. The trick here is to publish as many significant posts as you could. Each post will serve as a link to your main website, and would improve its link popularity.

These steps can be done in 3 days, and before the week is over, you’d be surprised that your website would have been indexed by Google, as well as the two other main search engines at that.

How To Get Your Website Indexed By Google Within 7 Days

What was once considered as impossible is now a very real probability. Yes, your website can be indexed in Google’s database within a week’s time after it goes live! How are you supposed to do this?

Google said that you should not bother to submit your website to them. They will find your website, and once they do, they’ll index your web pages. The reason behind this is quite simple. Google uses links to hop from one website to another. If they arrive at a page that is unfamiliar to their database, they will index it… and thus is the method by which your very own website can be a part of their database.

The problem is, there are literally billions of web pages out there. Even with the mechanical precision by which it operates, it will take weeks, if not months, before Google can stumble upon your website for proper indexing. The trick is in expediting this process. And how are you supposed to do that?

Let’s put it this way. If only one website is linking to yours, Google has to crawl through that site before it could discover yours. 1 in 1,000,000,000 is not a favorable ratio. But what if you have 1,000 websites linking to yours? Alas! Your website would have better chances of getting indexed fast!

The number of websites linking to yours is called your link popularity. To check your current link popularity, use the tool that can be found at www.linkpopularity.com .

Regardless of what number would appear (which, chances are, would be zero if you have just published your website), we will have to build your link popularity to at least a thousand so that Google can find your website within a week’s time.

How are we to do this?

Here are some specific steps you should follow.

1. Write 10 highly informative and unique articles about the topic of your website.

2. If you can’t write articles, as such would require a lot of time, hire a freelancer to do it for you. Go to www.rentacoder.com , www.elance.com or www.guru.com and advertise a job. You’ll receive some bids, and it’s up to you to select the best freelancer for the task you want done.

3. Submit these articles to as many article directories you could find. The ones you shouldn’t miss are www.exinearticles.com , www.goarticles.com and www.isnare.com . Being linked via the latter option has been known to work well with MSN rankings. There are more than a thousand prominent article directories today. If you have one article in each of their databanks, then you’d have a thousand pages linking to your website.

4. Create a blog at www.blogger.com . Choose the default hosting option, that is, allow Blogger to host your blog. Blogger is owned by Google. You see the point we’re driving at here? Make sure that your blog would link to your main website, either as a mention in your posts, or as a fixed link on your menu bar.

5. Link to as many blogs as possible. Chances are, the owners of those blogs would link to your blog as well, and the readers of those blogs may even do the same thing.

6. There are sure to be some forums devoted to the subject of your website. Find these forums and create an account with each of them. Use the tool at www.link-advantage.com/search to find the online community related to the subject of your site. Once you’re a member in those forums, include a link to your website in the signature box that would be provided for. Your signature box will appear in every post you will make. The trick here is to publish as many significant posts as you could. Each post will serve as a link to your main website, and would improve its link popularity.

These steps can be done in 3 days, and before the week is over, you’d be surprised that your website would have been indexed by Google, as well as the two other main search engines at that.

How To Set A Price For Your Online Product

How To Set A Price For Your Online Product
(Plus, How To Use Dynamic Pricing To Boost Your Sales Rate)

Internet marketing, by its very name is about promoting your products online. But to believe that internet marketing is all about, well, marketing, would be quite restrictive.

Assuming that you have already acquainted yourself with the intricacies of product creation as well as the myriad forms of advertising tactics that can be implemented online, we will now discuss a matter that could make or break your success in internet marketing.

Now, what we will be discussing is a subject that many online businessmen have taken for granted. It is that very thing that would connect your business to the affirmative action of your visitors. It is that very thing that would convert your visitors into paying customers.

We’re talking about the price for your product.

How exactly should you price your product? Naturally, you would want to reach a range that would recover the investments you have made for its creation and promotion. This is called the break even point. Anything above the break even point would be considered as your profit. Naturally, again, you would want to attain as much profit as possible.

So these are the two things that determine price:

1. how much you have invested; and
2. how much you want to earn per item

There are two approaches that are generally used when it comes to pricing. Let’s take a look at them.

1. Price your product a little over the break even point, and rely on the volume of items you will be able to sell.

2. Price your product substantially higher than the break even point, so that every sale would reap some substantial rewards.

If you foresee your product to be a hot seller, then the first approach would be the best one for your needs. You could just rake in your earnings through the several sales you will be able to achieve.

If you foresee slow sales for your product, then the second approach would be more appropriate. Each sale would give you what you need, and you won’t be pressured to sell a lot of items to realize your earnings.

But both approaches have their own shares of problems. Pricing your product too low might just give your prospective customers the impression that your product is of inferior quality. Pricing your product too high would alienate a large segment of the market.

Personally, I say that you should price your product for what it’s worth. Let the market forces take care of themselves. If you bestow a fair price for your product, you won’t have to worry about the backlash of consequences. Each product is a different case, and it merits special attention when it comes to pricing. Keep this in mind when deciding on the right price for the same.

But here’s a very secret tip: you could use the price of your product to tremendously boost your sales. Yes, you read that right. YOU CAN USE THE PRICE OF YOUR PRODUCT TO TREMENDOUSLY BOOST YOUR SALES. This is through a process called dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing can create an urgency that would compel people to purchase your product as soon as possible.

There are some tools that would allow you to implement dynamic pricing for your offers. The way it works is that you’d offer a product for an amazingly low price, with a warning that after a specified period of time, the price would increase. This increase would continue until the offer is priced beyond your market’s budget.

For example, an eBook can be offered for a mere $5 today. After 25 hours, its price would increase by $5. And after another 24 hours, the price would again increase by $5… and so on and so forth. The result would be mass hysteria, as the members of your target market would line up in a hurry to purchase your offer while it is cheap.

Dynamic pricing is one of those novel marketing strategies that has proved successful for many online businessmen. It’s worth the try if you want to experience an immediate rush of incoming orders.