It takes some knowledge of basic psychology and human behavior to succeed at marketing. People buy things to either meet their needs or satisfy their wants and desires. As a marketer, you are looking not at what your product has to offer, but at what is motivating your target audience to buy your product or service.

For example, people aren’t buying perfume because of the aroma. They are buying romance. The new exercise machine doesn’t sell because of the latest features, but because the customer is buying a healthier, perhaps thinner look. The end result of a product or service is what it does for buyers — how it makes them feel, look, or act. Even children are looking to have the same games as their friends, not just to play with, but to be popular and fit in. Therefore, you need to keep broad motivational reasons in mind when planning your marketing campaign.

There is also a psychological aspect to establishing trust and forming a relationship. Most customers have been burned, treated badly, swindled, or disenchanted at least once. They will not necessarily jump at the opportunity to buy something unless they have a sense of confidence in the seller. In an age where people are tired of receiving spam and a glut of marketing materials, the modern consumer has become savvy and somewhat cynical. Only a company with a strong proven reputation will gain their trust. You, therefore, want to always build a level of trust through quality of service, and this should be reflected in your marketing.

Finally, there are practical factors that enter into marketing. If it is simply inconvenient for a customer to purchase from you or you simply cannot satisfy their needs with the product they are seeking, then don’t attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole. Too many sales are lost by trying to do so. More importantly, you may risk ending a future relationship with the customer by losing their trust.

In the end you want to sell customers by gaining their trust and building a relationship based on customer satisfaction and by being honest and not trying to be everything to everyone.

Tags: Marketing, Marketing Campaign, Psychology of Marketing, Understanding Your Client

With more than a decade of experience in marketing, ranking from pay-per-click to direct mail, I’ve seen a lot of failures and far more successes when it comes to marketing.

Today, the art of marketing is far more complex than it once was. However, many of the same basic principles still apply. Too often, professional marketers and small business owners overlook the basic techniques that have separated successful campaigns from those that never turn a profit. Here is my all time list of effective marketing tips.

1.  Know your audience. Successful campaigns get that way because marketers know their audience. They fully understand their needs, how to help meet those needs and how to create demand. Knowing and understanding your audience through proper market segmentation means a well targeted campaign that generates a profitable return.

2.  Focus on the offer. A marketing offer is the driving force of marketing promotions that drive results. In fact, market testing has proven that the offer is the most significant criterion for conversion. Focus on your offer if you want to be successful.

3.  Split test. Never ever run a campaign without testing something. One of the most common is a split test which allows you to simultaneously test two versions of something. It can be a web page, post card, or email. Split testing is essential for improving performance.

4.  Never work alone. The most creative ideas come from working with other creative people. Don’t feel like you need to have all the answers or great ideas. You may start with an idea, but an open dialog with creative individuals will make it better.

5.  Don’t sell on price. I’ve seen so many marketers fail because they sell on price alone. This leads to a discounting war, lower profitability, and often bankruptcy. Rather, focus on creating so much value that the perception of price becomes insignificant.

6.  Consistent messaging. Consider the entire user experience before you launch a campaign. From email to website to offer, is the prospect having a consistent user experience? If they are, your campaigns stand above 98% of others.

7.  Create value after the sale. As marketers, it’s our job to understand our market segment and build relationships, not dump people off at the front door of our store and walk away. Focus as much of your energy on building relationships with customers as you do prospects.

8.  Test. Test. Test. In addition to split testing, you should consider multiple forms of testing in each marketing discipline. For direct mail, test headlines, offers, copy, time of direct mail drop, etc. Consider testing a life long mission.

9.  Integrated Marketing Works Best. You can’t rely on one form of marketing to carry you to success. It’s okay to generate most of your leads or sales through PPC marketing if you will but what happens when that dries out? Use multiple media sources to meet your goals.

10.  Nothing can replace experience. You can run out and hire all of the best consultants in the world, but you still have to do the work. Nothing can replace actual experience. It will make you a stronger marketer and more successful in the long term.

Apply these helpful marketing tips if you want to be truly successful. These techniques and tips are applied by successful marketers on a daily basis. The result is an ever growing success rate of marketing success.

Tags: Marketing Campaigns, Marketing Tips, Networking

SEO is a race. And in any race learning from your competitors makes you a better runner. Even when you’re running first it’s sometimes good to look back and check the runner-ups. And if you’re not the yellow jersey guy, you absolutely should examine the leaders: their gear, their training, their strategy. In SEO the most interesting thing about your competition are their links.

Whether you like it or not SEO is still pretty much about links. Good link profile can make up for almost any lack of optimized content and other onpage flaws. Love or hate, the best thing you can do about it is embrace the fact and run with it.

So let’s go through some tricks that will enable you to look deeper into your competition’s link profile granting you access to the restricted areas: their locker room, dirty laundry and even the briefing hall where they plan their link building strategies.

Let’s Talk Competitive Link Research

Finding out where your competitors’ links come from is not all that hard. You just go to Yahoo! or Google and type in link:www.your-competitor.com to get a list of inbound links to the site.

Yahoo’s much better in that respect as it tends to give more extensive and accurate data. The problem here is that there’s a limit of 1,000 links per website which is often not enough as the fattest link sources get left behind the limit fence. Here’re some tips to break through to the other side.

Note: If you’re lazy like me skip to the end of the article where I’ll share a tool that does it all much quicker.

Trick 1: Search for Links to Particular Web Pages of a Competing Site

Alongside with link:www.your-competitor.com search for

link:www.your-competitor.com/products.html or
link:www.your-competitor.com/services.html

and so on.

Trick 2: Exclude Internal Links

You may examine the internal linking structure of your competition if you want to gain some insight on their navigation and marketing steps. But as we want to find more external links, let’s exclude the internal ones.

You can do this by adding -site:site.com operator to your search query. Type in:

link:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com

and you’ll get a list of external backlinks only.

There’s a dropdown option in Yahoo! site explorer that does the same.

Trick 3: Exclude Links Coming from Certain Domains

The -site: modifier lets you exclude links coming from specific sites. So, whenever you see a large chunk of links coming from the same domain add -site:thisdomain.com modifier to your query and the links from this site will get replaced with new ones.

You can add -site: multiple times in one query so that you have something like this:

link:www.cnn.com -site:cnn.com -site:en.wikipedia.org

Trick 4: Check Links Coming from Certain TLDs

This is a little known trick. The site: modifier actually lets you get a list of links coming from domains with certain TLDs: .com, .org, .edu, .co.uk and so on. Just type in

link:www.your-competitor.com site:.gov or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com site:.gov

and you’ll get a list of .gov sites linking to your rival.

Note: Do this in Yahoo! regular search, not site explorer

Trick 5: Exclude Links Coming from Certain TLDs

This is an even lesser known trick. You can exclude certain TLDs from the results with the -site:.tld modifier. Usually the biggest chunk of links comes from .com’s so add a -site.com modifier and you’ll get lots of new link data.

Trick 6: Use Different Combinations of the First 5 Tricks

Try link:www.your-competitor.com/page.html -site:your-competitor.com -site:.com
Or link:www.your-competitor.com site:.org -site:wikipedia.org

Give it a thought and I’m sure you’ll come up with lots of ideas. Feel free to share your findings in the comments.

Trick 7: Use the Above 6 Tricks in Different Search Engines

Don’t limit your searches to Yahoo! and Google, go to AltaVista, Alexa, (Bing doesn’t give you link data, so forget about it) but then there’re Exalead, Excite and tons of regional search engines. Search them, get rid of the the duplicates and you’ll have a goooooooooooooooogol of competitor’s links to study.

Note: Some search engines have a different set of operators so you’ll need to type domain:instead of link:.

Getting It All Done Fast

This sure seems like a lot of work and it is. Moreover, getting the links list is only the beginning and the easy part of competitive link research. Once you get the list you need to analyze each link, weed out poor quality sites and only leave the ones you can get a link from. Now THAT’s a lot of work.

I’m too lazy to do this all by hand, besides I value my time too much to waste it on such kind of work. That’s why I use SEO SpyGlass an advanced link analysis tool that employs all the tricks described in this article (plus some more advanced ones I don’t even know) to get up to 25,000 links per domain, which is much, much more than any other tool can get.

SEO SpyGlass also finds all the data I need to analyze the links:

• Google PR of the domain and linking page
• The URL and title of the linking page
• The anchor text and description
• Whether the link is still on the page (sometimes the link gets removed but search engines will
think it’s there till they reindex the page).
• Whether the link is no-follow or dofollow
• How many other links are on the page
• How much link value the link passes
• And some other data like TLDs, domain age, country, etc.

If you want to do competitive link research seriously, I’d strongly recommend trying SEO SpyGlass out. And of course you can always use my tricks whenever you want to run a quick background check on that new guy on your block.

Note: This article first appeared on Site-Reference.com

About The Author
Get more link building advice and SEO software to help you implement it. Richard Gilmore is an Internet marketer, freelance SEO, author and addicted guitar player.

Tags: External Links, Internal Links, Link Building, SEO

Back in June, Adobe announced they were providing technology to Google and Yahoo that would allow the search engines to crawl Flash content. While this isn’t new news, it’s really cool to finally see this in action. A new client of mine has a web site with the entire navigation system embedded in a SWF Flash banner. With the help of Adobe’s Searchable SWF Library, Google crawled all the pages in a matter of days without me having to add a text-based navigation system anywhere on the pages. Quite often it isn’t feasible, or visually appealing, to clutter up a Flash site with text links at the bottom of every page just for SEO purposes.

The indexing was achieved by Adobe providing Google and Yahoo with technology that allowed the search spiders to navigate as a virtual user. It would see the same content and links you or I would.

One important item of note, however, is that Google still cannot index Flash content if the SWF Flash file is loaded by JavaScript. JavaScript still presents a wide range of problems for search engines and should be used with caution on web sites.

This new ability to index more content has a twofold effect: First, suddenly there is more content available to search engine users that was previously hidden. And second, webmasters won’t have to sacrifice the look and feel of web sites anymore by shying away from using Flash.

Click here to see the official announcement on Googles blog.

Tags: Adobe, Content, Crawl, Flash, Google, Search Engine Spiders, SEO, SWF, Yahoo

When I sit down with new clients and discuss the status of their new or existing site they are often shocked when I am forced to inform them that their site is not search engine friendly. Encountered with a blank but slightly shaken look I then explain that this means their site has a particular problem that is hindering search engine rankings. Often this is represented by an inflexible design, overuse of advanced web technologies, or simply a weak navigation scheme. As a result, if they were to continue with the site as it stands they are unlikely to attain competitive search engine rankings.

The following is checklist designed to help you gauge the search engine friendliness of your website and, if you are in the midst of planning a website this checklist will help you avoid the common pitfalls of unfriendly designs.

Technologies
First consider what technologies your website is using. There are certain technologies that require a little more hand holding than others to ensure search engine compatibility.

1. FRAMES
Lets start with this oldie. Luckily, frames are becoming a way of the past what with the use of DIV layers and the slow onset of incredibly flexible AJAX coding. The long and the short of it is that if you have Frames on your website then you are starting off at a disadvantaged position that cannot be truly search engine friendly no matter what you do. There are, however, some remedial fixes that will tie you over until you can redesign your site; yes I said redesign. The fix that I recommend is to use a noframes tag whereby you place another version of your web page inside of your framed page. This ‘backup’ page is what the search engines will view; here you can place relevant content and navigational elements so that the search engines can at least navigate portions of your site that are (hopefully) not framed.

More info on the no frames tags.

2. FLASH
There was a big brouhaha that Flash had become search engine indexable and you no longer had to worry about its search engine issues. Frankly, I have not seen the fruits of this ‘improvement’ to a respectable degree yet so I still consider it a kiss of death for websites designed solely in Flash. If you have a Flash-only website then I recommend one of these two options; one is to design an html version of your website and make the home page of your website html rather than Flash where you can then allow users to choose between html or Flash. The second option is to redesign the site so that it mixes both html and flash together. For example, this might mean implementing Flash amidst content on an HTML page as you would an image. I realize there are certain limitations to this option but if you can create a slick site in this manner then you will have the best of both worlds; clean search engine friendly content along with an interactive, multimedia feel. Just remember that the majority of relevant text should be in HTML format for the search engines to index.

3. Search Engine ‘Unfriendly’ Dynamic URL’s
Unfriendly dynamic URL’s are a common side effect of using a Content Management System that is not designed with search engine rankings kept in mind. Here are some examples of some unfriendly URL’s:

Sample 1:
www.mydomain.com/myproducts.php&354=prod333&subproduct

Sample 2:
www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/
filename.php?id=F98ZF4&productId=39222&section=wicked&brand=582&template=532

These URLs are problematic because a search engine may consider these addresses too complex to spider. Why too complex? Suffice it to say that the more complex the URL, the higher the chance that a search engine robot will consider the content too dynamic to read; it changes too often to be valuable to a search engine.

The way around these types of URLs is actually not so difficult; it may only require a small investment of time and money. The ‘time’ will be required when researching which URL fix is right for your system. The money may be required to pay a programmer to implement and test the new URLs. Here are how the URLs might look once they are fixed to be search engine friendly:

Sample 1 Fixed:
www.mydomain.com/myproducts/354/prod333/subproduct/

Sample 2 Fixed:
www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/wickedboards/39222/
board532/

These URLs are better because they do not include the extraneous characters that are so telltale on dynamic websites. In addition, the URLs are designed to appear like normal website directories when in fact they are dynamic URLs.

Important: it is vital that you minimize the length of the URLs that you use. Search engines may stop crawling a website if there appear to be too many subdirectories. The samples above show fixed URLs that have about as many subdirectories as I would allow (4).

Design
This section focuses on the overall layout and usability of your designs from the perspective of a search engine robot. Search engine friendly design is occasionally quite complex so I have provided a list of the most common issues to consider.

1. Menus
Are the menus on your website spiderable? If not you may be hiding major areas of your website from search engine spiders and missing out on additional search engine rankings.

The fact is there are very few menus out there that a search engine will have a problem following, but there are definitely some worth avoiding. For instance do not use a JavaScript Jump Menu (example) as the core mode of navigation of your website; search engines cannot index this type of menu. Also be careful of Flash menus, they look slick but they will impede the progress of a search engine spider especially if they are the only means of navigation within your site.

General Menu Rules
The ideal menu would be text based and each text link would include the keywords you are targeting on the destination page. Setting up a menu with this much forethought requires that you determine the layout and content for your site before web design begins. Once you have a clear picture of the content for each page you can then research the keywords that are best to target per webpage. This essential keyword research can be done in house easily enough using systems-like keyword research tools that provide you with a glimpse into how your customers think by showing how many searches there are per month (or year) for a particular term.

Remember, almost every page within your site has a very real opportunity to gain a top ranking; all you need to do is ensure that the design, content and site structure is optimized. Ensuring that the menu is carefully thought out and designed is a crucial step for top rankings.

Finally, if you are at all uncertain whether your menu is search engine friendly then be certain to back it up with a text menu in the footer of your page using the same keyword targeting principles noted above.

Tech Advice: a simple text menu may be less than desirable for you; in this case I recommend DHTML menus. These menus use text but in a manner that is quite appealing and very search engine friendly.

2. Sitemaps
Sitemaps can dramatically help the visibility of your website by allowing search engine spiders easy access to all of the pages in your site. Place a link to the sitemap on every page within your site to ensure easy access no matter where a search engine or user enters your site.

Sitemap Tips
Just having a sitemap will help but how you build your sitemap will also play a role in how well the search engines catalogue it. For example, if you have a twenty-page website it would be ideal to create a sitemap where each page is represented by a title along with a short description. Ultimately, the page may be a bit long but it will have content that the search engines like to index and it will boost the relevance of the linked pages because the titles will accurately represent the content. So in effect, you will now have more than just a sitemap; you will have a table of contents for your site that has the potential of getting a ranking and provides an extra boost to the ranking worthiness of each page.

Google Sitemap
Google Sitemap is an additional design element that you should consider adding.

3. Layout
How you layout your page can make a significant difference in how well your site ranks and ultimately how search engine friendly it is.

Tips for Layout
Search engine robots read a webpage from the top of the source code (the programming that made your page – see “view source” in your browser) all the way to the bottom. As a result, it is important to ensure that both of the following elements are found as close to the beginning of code as possible:

A) A short sentence introducing the topic using the keyword targets you have chosen for the page.
B) Your text menu and other navigational aids, or if this is not possible it would be even more beneficial to start with a paragraph or two of relevant content followed by the navigation.

By placing this information near to the top of the page, you will promptly present the search engine robot with relevant text that backs up the page title and backlinks. You will also provide an immediate sitemap of sorts for the search engine to spider, which includes keywords relevant to each page.

4. Splash Pages – ACK!
With the odd exception Splash Pages are a kiss of death for a website because the home page (the first page seen when someone visits your domain), your most important page, is often converted into nothing but an excess entry point with little or no relevant content on it. Aside from reducing your chances for ranking, you are also making your visitors take another step to get to content or sales material in your site. Any additional steps you add will lessen the likelihood of a successful sale.

Please Let Me Change Your Mind
If you think you need to use a splash page then you need to talk to someone who will change your mind. No, honestly, give me a call if you want because there is nothing more painful to a SEO or search engine friendly web designer to see a Splash Page in use. If, in the unlikely scenario your splash page is required, there are ways to make it slightly more search engine friendly.

1) Add a highly relevant and well-worded paragraph to the page so that the search engines have something to index that shows them they are in the right place.
2) Either provide a link to your sitemap or implement a text menu in the footer of the page so the search engines can access the internal workings of your website without having to take an extra step.

In Summary
Creating a search engine friendly website requires a basic to advanced understanding of how a searchengine works, depending on the complexity of the planned website. Complexity aside, the notes above provide a good basis for you to evaluate the friendliness of your website and make changes where necessary.  Click here to learn more about SEO and how we can help you.

Article Written by:   Ross Dunn

Tags: Design, Flash, Frames, Google Sitemap, Layout, Menus, SEO, SEO Tips, Sitemap Tips, Sitemaps, Splash Pages, Unfriendly Dynamic URL's, Unfriendly URL's

Keyword Research Tools

Before conducting any search engine promotion it is extremely important to know the ‘terrain’ of your online marketplace. The following tools will aid you by providing a glimpse into the search habits of your prospective customers.

1. KeyWordDiscovery ($) **** Highly Recommended!
   This is an impressive tool that will provide you with a glimpse into the annual search frequencies for particular search terms. Also of relevance is a graph provided in the paid version which outlines the seasonal use of keywords (i.e. when is your phrase searched for less during the year). This type of seasonal data can help you plan the keyword targets for varying seasons, ultimately saving you money.
2. WordTracker ($) – This tool has been around a while so the services it provides are time tested and informative. WordTracker is used and recommended by the best in SEO.
3. Google AdWords: Keyword Tool (FREE) – Where better to get your keyword intelligence than from the source itself? Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool is a powerful alternative to the paid options. It doesn’t offer any of the project saving capabilities or advanced query search options but the data is undeniably useful.

Website Analytics Tools

1. ClickTracks ($$$) or ($ via CSP) **** Highly Recommended
   Chi-Sky uses ClickTracks almost exclusively because we find their software and support to be second to none in the analytics realm. We love it so much that we now offer ClickTracks reporting services to our clientele.
2. Google Analytics (Free)
   Opened to the public as a free service in August 2006 this program is very powerful and flexible. It features integration with Google Adwords promotion and a whole host of very cool reports. Google Analytics does not, however, provide fraud reporting and analysis for pay-per-click marketing – a significant disadvantage over ClickTracks.  In addition, the segmentation capabilities that were added in late 2008 are a welcome addition but they still lack some of the capabilities built into ClickTracks.
3. Omniture ($$$$)
   Probably the most complex and full featured web analytics program available today. Our experience with Omniture has been very positive but the system is too intense for small business. If you have a large company or a site with loads of traffic (think millions of unique visitors per month) then this is the program for you.
4. WebTrends ($$)
   We had extensive experience with this program in the early years of Chi-Sky’s web development and it was a great tool then but it’s time in the limelight appears to be waning.

Competitor Analysis Research Tools

Need to research a competitor? Are you planning to do this yourself? If so here are three of the top programs you need. Think of them as your personal SEO detective kit.

1. OptiLink ($) : Discover where your competitor’s backlinks are coming from by compiling a list of their backlinks and automatically analyzing them with OptiLink. This program is reasonably priced and provides awesome support plus updates for life – you can’t ask for better. This is a mandatory tool in our SEO toolbox.
2. OptiSpider ($) : Similar to OptiLink this tool will take a different angle when analyzing your competitor’s site. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know just how your competitor’s have optimized their website’s? This tool will crawl and catalogue their site just like a search engine spider and provide you with a very revealing report.
3. WebPosition Gold ($) : Monitor the ranking position of your competitors. With this tool you can keep an eye on your competitors and reveal which search engine keywords they are ranking for. This kind of information can be gold if you are new to the market and don’t want to invent the wheel; benefit from their experience and consider targeting the same keyphrase’s! Download a free trial of WebPosition here.
4. SEO for Firefox (Free) : A great plugin from SEO Book for analyzing websites while you surf the web in the excellent (and free) FireFox web browser.
5. XENU Link Sleuth (Free) : A popular tool for many SEOs, XENU can quickly analyze your own or a competitor’s site.
6. Compete ($) : This great tool can provide a statistical comparison of up to 5 different websites. Excellent for competitor analysis but the final data should be taken with a grain of salt because Compete can only produce stats on the limited data available.
7. WWW or Not? (Free) : Is link popularity split between two versions of a domain name (i.e. domain.com vs www.domain.com)? If so, this tool will tell you. This is valuable if you want to see if your own website has extra link popularity sitting on the sidelines from other sites that have linked to the ‘wrong’ address.
8. PR Prowler ($) : Although PageRank is not nearly as black and white as it once was, PR Prowler serves as a helpful method for finding the best sites to get links from or to advertise on.
9. Check Server Headers Tool (Free) : This somewhat technical tool that is offered free of charge by a company called StepForth.  It provides valuable insight into the setup of yours or your competitor’s servers. For example, Chi-Sky uses this tool to verify that our clients have properly set up their server redirects (301’s) so that duplicate content issues are avoided. It is also used extensively within our competitor analysis reports; it is useful to see how your competitors might have an edge over you.
10. DomainTools.com (Free) : Domain Tools is one of my favorite sites for competitor analysis. The most useful component, the Reverse IP Tool, allows me to plunk in a single competitor’s domain and then see every other website that is hosted on its server. In rare instances where the co-hosted domains are owned by the competitor I can get a hint at any future marketing plans my clients should be made aware of.
11. Robots.txt Syntax Checker (Free) : There is nothing worse than making an error in a Robots.txt file and accidentally dropping a site out of the search engines. The free Robots.txt checker will review your Robots.txt file; ensuring it is properly created and it will provide you with the rules within the file in plain language to ensure everything meets your approval. This is a valuable tool for avoiding serious indexing issues.

Not so sure you want to tackle your own competitor research?
Chi-Sky offers basic to advanced competitor analysis services.  Click here to learn more about this service.

Ranking Reporting Tools

Keep an eye on your search engine rankings across the major and minor search engines; should you see a drop or increase in your rankings you will be better informed and know how to respond.

• WebPosition Gold ($)
  Chi-Sky exclusively uses WebPosition Gold because it has reliably provided quality search engine ranking reports for our clients since Chi-Sky’s inception. WebPosition Gold is the best program available to provide you with the ranking statistics you need to stay on top of the competition, maintain your rankings and get to the top of the search engines. This is only a reporting tool but by knowing where you are ‘at’ you will have the capability to respond fluidly and in an informed manner.

  PS. Chi-Sky only recommends using the reporting tool not the optimization tools and such that the program also includes.

What, That’s It? Yes, we recommend no other service because we cannot find any that compare!  Of all the programs we have tested WebPosition is the only one that has reliable data (more often than not) and has exportable/email-able reports that are actually easy on the eyes. If you would like to submit your software for review please let us know but expect that we will require a full professional copy of the software to test the program.

SEO Friendly URL Solutions

In many cases website URL’s are the reason that web sites are not fully indexed by visiting search engine spiders. Here are a few rewrite solutions that you can employ to correct your unfriendly URL’s and open the door to search engine spiders:

1. Apache Servers: Mod Rewrite (Free, capability comes with Apache)
   In Apache servers the URL rewriting feature is named Mod Rewrite. Here is a link to a search engine watch forum thread discussing this feature and how to enable it.
2. Windows (IIS) Servers: ISAPI Rewrites ($)
   This is a 3rd party software program designed to enable custom URL rewriting features for Windows IIS servers. More information on ISAPI Rewrite.
3. Windows: .Net Rewrite
   Ok, I am no programmer or system administrator so I am getting out of my depth here but I believe this is another tool that would work for rewriting URL’s for web sites using .Net (this link is definitely for techies only!)

UNCERTAIN?
Are you unsure if your site uses unfriendly URL’s?  Contact Chi-Sky to ensure you have not missed anything else that may be impeding your online success.

XML Sitemap Creation Tools

The following XML sitemap creation tools are extremely handy for creating and maintaining website XML sitemaps for submission to search engines:

• Vigos Google Sitemap Generator (Free) : this great free tool will make your life easier by spidering and automatically generating a slick XML sitemap for your website. Plenty of useful controlled page update options are also provided.

Not sure you want to tackle this all alone?  Click here to learn more about how Chi-Sky can prepare and configure your website for online success.

Tags: .Net Rewrite, Apache Servers, Bad URLS's, Check Server Headers Tool, ClickTracks, Compete, Competitor Analysis Research Tools, DomainTools.com, Fixing Bad URL's, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, ISAPI Rewrites, Keyword Research Tools, Keyword Tool, KeywordDiscovery, Mod Rewrite, Omniture, Optilink, OptiSpider, PR Prowler, Ranking Reporting Tools, Reverse IP Tool, Robots.txt Syntax Checker, SEO for Firefox, SEO Friendly URL Solutions, Vigos Google Sitemap Generator, Web Marketing, Web Marketing Tools, WebPosition Gold, Website Analytics Tools, WebTrends, Windows Servers, WordTracker, WWW, XML sitemap, XML Sitemap Creation, ZENU Link Sleuth

If you think Twitter, Facebook, and other online social media communities are only for teens, you’re missing out on valuable and free marketing platforms for your brand (book, business or product).

Further, if you’re not on social media, you’re risking losing your own potential clients/customers to those smart business people who are utilizing social media.

Which social media platforms you focus on depends a great deal on what your brand is. Here are seven excellent reasons why you must use social media no matter what you are promoting:

It’s the Most Cost-Effective Online Advertising.

The current most popular social media platforms being used for business are free: Twitter.com, Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com. (LinkedIn does have an upgrade that costs, but it’s not necessary to get this upgrade.) And this is ”relationship” marketing to targeted markets. “Free” is definitely more cost-effective than spending money on online advertising techniques such as Pay Per Click or banner ads.

You Can Have Global Reach With Social Media.

The world is now a global marketplace. Why not reach this global market? Many of the most popular social media platforms have this global reach, and you can see this clearly illustrated on Twitter. At any time of day or night you can see real-time “tweets” from people in Japan, England, the U.S., India and many other countries.

For example, if you have a book that might appeal to anyone in the world who reads in English, why limit yourself to just promoting in the U.S.? Thanks to Amazon people outside the U.S. can buy your book even if it is only available in U.S. stores.

You Can Attract Targeted Groups of People as Potential Clients/Customers.

Social media enables you to join groups of people with the same interests and goals. On LinkedIn and Facebook you can join groups as varied as Children’s Book Writers to eMarketing. If you choose groups to join based on your brand, you’ll be putting yourself in front of the exact groups of people you want to reach as potential clients/customers. This can pay off in increased sales for you.

Form Your Own Community by Using the Community Aspect of SMP’s.

Once you are active on social media platforms and have people who are your followers (Twitter), your friends (Facebook) and/or your connections (LinkedIn), you can start your own groups of highly targeted interests. You can create a niche market in your brand, book or business and share your knowledge with others who join your community.

These people can become your loyal followers, friends and connections – and they can help spread your marketing message to their followers, friends and connections.

You Can Use Social Media to Establish Your Expertise.

People like to do business with people they know, like and trust. By sharing your knowledge for free online with the people in the social media groups you belong to, you can establish yourself as an expert. This can pay off in increasing potential clients/customers’ trust in you.

And you can also receive invitations for blog “interviews” or BlogTalkRadio show interviews or podcasts. And these interviews lead to more free exposure for your brand and more free promotion for your expertise.

You Can Use Social Media to Find Cross-Promotional Partners.

Amazingly in the world of social media, people who would be considered competitors in the off-line world are teaming up to provide products and services to their combined clients/customers.

And these clients/customers are very responsive to these cross-promotions (often called joint ventures) – especially when introduced to a second expert by a first expert they already know, like and trust.

You and your cross-promotion partner can each get access to the other person’s “list” (the names of interested clients/customers collected at a website) and thus you’ve greatly expanded your potential client/customer pool.

With a Few Keystrokes You Can Announce New Updates of Your Activities.

Your updates on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn take seconds - and you’ve announced to your followers, friends and connections what you’re doing or what you’re offering or what you’re speaking on. And there are even online applications that allow you to update your status across several of your social media accounts at one time. So it is as easy as 1-2-3 to keep in front of your potential clients/customers.

In conclusion, once you become active yourself on social media platforms, you’ll find many more reasons to promote your brand, book or business on social media in order to attract targeted potential clients/customers. And you’ll look back at your pre-social media days and wonder how you ever did marketing without using online social media.

Click here to learn how Chi-Sky can help you with this.

Article Written by:   Phyllis Zimbler Miller  (c)  2009

Tags: Facebook, Facebook Marketing, Free Marketing, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Myspace, Organic Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Platforms as Marketing Tools, Twitter, Twitter Marketing