Graphic Design Software-What’s this doing here?

Great graphics can help to create a more compelling web-site and can also add to the professionalism, credibility and the perceived trustworthiness of a website.

Market Samurai-The deadliest marketing tool ever?

I love this tool.  Sure you can use the built in Adwords Keywords tool for free but Market Samurai takes keyword analysis and niche idenfication to a new level.
Introduction.
As with all good tools Market Samurai is actually a suite of specialised tools which are integrated to allow complex analysis and cross-referencing to take place.
It also [...]

Internet Business Promoter

In my opinion and based on my actual use of this product. Internet Business Promoter is the deadliest online marketing tool available today.

SEO Powersuite Review.

Posted by admin on July 21st, 2010

Seo Powersuite.

I have only just started using this suite of tools, so this blog will get updated as and when I need to use the tools.

I have used the Link-Tracker tool from the SEO Spyglass component of the SEO Powersuite and my first impressions are of a very comprehensive tool. I am currently updating one of my ecommerce sites and am moving across to a design/ecommerce company to design the site and help improve the IA (information architecture) of the site.

This site has been established 6 years and has 1000s of incoming links. I still want to use these incoming links, without having to use 301 redirects when the new site is set up.

What we’ve decided to do is to analyse the incoming links and the associated URL of the landing page and keep the URL of these linked-to pages the same.

I decide to use the SEO Powersuite Spyglass tool to help me.

I must say it really does do a fantastic job of identiying and then valuing the links coming in to a website.

The results can be filtered and sorted as necessary and this really made my job easier and simpler than if I had used some of the alternative SEO tools available.

The depth and extent of data for each link is impressive and can help you to develop and evolve your linking strategy.

More to follow…

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Graphic Design Software-What’s this doing here?

Posted by admin on June 25th, 2010

Xara Xtreme/Designer-the quickest way to smart graphics.

Why, you may ask have I included a graphics program as a “deadly marketing tool”. To answer this just look below to see what I mean.

What style is more pleasing to the eye?

Great graphics can help to create a more compelling web-site and can also add to the professionalism, credibility and the perceived trustworthiness of a website.

If like me, you just want to get good looking graphics on your site in the least amount of time with the least amount of hassle, then Xara is probably the graphics program for you.

It uses vector graphics, which means that there is no loss of quality, no matter how much you zoom or manipulate the images.

What I like about it is that it can create different web elements, quickly, intuitively and without any fuss. The images can be manipulated in real time without having to navigate to another smaller window and then having to return to the main window to see the actual result. In Xara Xtreme (now renamed to Xara Designer 6) the effects can be seen in real-time, as you work, and the images are manipulated by using intuitive drag and drop/click and hold controls.

It can edit photos. It’s nowhere near as capable (or indeed complex) as Adobe Photoshop, but for the average website owner wanting to smarten up or enhance their photos then it is great with all the functionality (and more) that you really need without any of the bloat.

As you’d expect there you can export to all of the standard formats, jpeg, gif, png, pdf etc. I have used the PDF format to produce print-quality catalogues and CD covers with good results.

There is a facility to open .psd (Photoshop files) in Xara but whenever I have tried to use this feature there is often a formatting error and the file doesn’t open exactly as it should.

Xara has a long history and pedigree and some of the technologies used in the program have been used by other software vendors (such as Corel, who I think owned Xara for a while). The shadow, bevel and transparency tools all work wonderfully and are very intuitive to use.

I use Xara for all of my headers and find that it works great. I have tried using Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. I did not find Illustrator very intuitive and found that the small pop-up screens interrupted my work flow. Corel Draw appeared to be ok, I just preferred Xara.

I’ve also used it to develop different versions of the same web-component be that a button or text to carry out multi-variate testing on my sites.

It has a web-site design capability; this is more suited to small personal/information sites or club/association sites rather than blogs or ecommerce sites. Having said that it would make a great tool for the one page affiliate sign-up style pages.

This is capable in its own right but would not be suitable for any project which requires multiple authors or logins.

Xara Xtreme/Xara Designer can also produce animated gifs and basic flash banners which would be great for producing affiliate banner ads etc.

It has a bit of a cult following and many professional graphic designers will have Xara as part of their graphics software collection. Many say that the interface and tools are more suited to the flowing work process which artists and graphic designers often prefer.

I would say that the time required to learn the basic functions of Xara will be far less than most other Graphic Design software tools available and that this ease of use is not compromised by any lack of functionality or capability.

Virtually every functional tool has the ability to work at several levels and complexity and if greater control is needed then just drill down into the appropriate level.

So, what are you waiting for? Save time, save effort and save money by producing your own high quality custom logos and graphics for your own site.

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SEO Tips: 5 Factors That Affect Your Site’s Ranking Potential

Posted by admin on June 15th, 2010

What questions do SEO clients ask most often? The top-ten FAQ certainly includes how can my site get page one (or two but no more than three) Google ranking?

Well, I always tell my clients it depends on how strong their competitors are and what keywords and phrases to target. When a web site has a few competing sites well formulated to the taste of search engine algorithms, it takes much more effort.

Here’s a five-point checklist to gauge your sites ranking potential:

1. Analyse keyword or phrase difficulty.

Choice of keywords or phrases plays a vital part in an SEO campaign because it saves you the shots in the dark. The most valuable keyword sets are those with high traffic potential but limited competition. Some of the popular keyword research tools are Wordtracker, SEOMOZ Keyword Difficulty Tool, SEOBook Keyword Tool and Google Keyword Tool.

What if a keyword is too difficult? Stick to it if you think your time and effort will eventually get your site well ranked. Otherwise, research on its variations or long tail terms. There’re always hidden gold mines no matter how fierce the competition is.

2. Check If Top Ranking Sites Are Well Optimized

Don’t be scared of aiming high. Analyse the top 10 or 20 sites ranked for a specific keyword or phrase in Google or Yahoo SERPs (If you gets decent rankings in these two, you could afford to forget the rest).

How do you know if a web site has been optimized? It’s not hard to tell because SEO leaves traces. Does the site have quality back links? What is keyword density of its important pages? Do different pages have unique Meta tags? Does its internal linking structure promote the most important pages? Are keywords in URLs hyphen-related? For how many years is the domain registered? The list goes on…

3. Check PPC Ads From Competitors

Some SEO professionals ignore this part too. If, after using keyword difficulty tools, you’re still not sure how difficult it’ll be to rank for a keyword, PPC results could give you a more complete view. The more advertisers are paying for a keyword or phrase, the harder to get high ranking for it.

It’s a good idea to open a Google Adwords account and find the PPC rates for keywords or phrases that you’re targeting. High rates usually indicate intense competition.

4. Study Back Link Structure of Competitors

Back link study involves the number and type of inbound links as well as the anchor text used. If you’re looking for free tools, I strongly suggest Yahoo Site Explorer. Again, Aim high and check back links of top ten or 20 ranking sites for the keywords or phrases you’ve chosen. How many back links does a site have? How many are deep links? How many back links come from .edu and .org domains? How many are from link exchange partners? Does it have links from news sites?

5. Other Important Data to Go Through

Finally, explore some other important data on a competing site to supplement the above study. Is it included in authoritative directories such as Dmoz, Best of the Web and Yahoo? What’s its Alexa ranking? What is the Page Rank? Don’t forget to check if its social media presence fits into the SEO equation. Say, how many times has it been bookmarked on delicious or how many followers it has on twitter?

After this five-point check, you should have a general idea of how difficult it is to get your site ranked high. So brainstorm using a mix of the data you’ve acquired and proceed to determine what keywords or phrases to target. That’s the core of an SEO campaign.

Source anon from Article City.

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Five Keys to Creating an Effective Marketing Strategy

Posted by admin on June 11th, 2010

If you´re just venturing out into the world of online business, you should make marketing your top priority. Before you try to reinvent the wheel, there are five steps that professional businesses use to attract customers and have them buy consistently.

Knowing who those customers are particularly important if you´re involved in an affiliate program. Many programs offer up a plethora of products but you are unlikely to promote them all. The best you can do is focus on those one or two products you are most interested in selling, then build your promotions and advertising to appeal to those customers that have the same interests that you do.

The third key is setting down an advertising budget. There are many ways to advertise, some free and others expensive. Only you can decide how much money to set aside toward advertising. If you know who your target market is going to be, you won´t waste dollars placing ads that attract little attention. Professionals don´t blow their ad budget on too many ads in the hope the customers will come. They make trial runs of their ads. Some work. Some don´t. Those that pull merit more money to keep them running.

Invest in the website tools is the fourth important key. Your website is what the customer looks at and he won´t be viewing it long if you have nothing solid to offer. Your site needs the tools that attract and hold the customer´s attention until he is ready to buy. That means having valuable content, something the customer can use immediately.

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5 Tested And Proven Online Marketing Trends in Traffic Generation

Posted by admin on June 11th, 2010

This article summarizes the 5 top online marketing trends in building website traffic. Successful online marketers have used thse traffic generation methods together to generate massive amounts of visitors to their sites.

The 5 online marketing trends for traffic building are not ranked in terms of effectiveness. Every method has its own ability to draw large amounts of traffic but it depends on how an internet marketer focusing his efforts on a particular method.

1) Paid Traffic

This consists of Pay Per Click Ads (PPC) and advertising on other sites. One example is Google Adwords, which allows you to set up your own advertising campaign by bidding for keywords to get on top of the Google Search Engine. In the latter, online marketers pay websites owners with lots of traffic to be advertised on their site, hence giving themselves exposure to these visitors.

2) Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science of getting your website on top of a particular search engine for a particular search term. There are many free or paid resources on the internet which teach SEO by teaching users how to optimize their websites with keywords and making their site “search engine friendly”.

Other components of search engine optimization include article marketing, blog directories and link exchanges.

3) Viral Marketing

Also known as word of mouth marketing, this method allows the good news of your site spread like wildfire among a large audience through the use of social media websites such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook and video streaming sites.

4) Traffic Generation Softwares

One of latest online marketing trends used today in generating traffic is through the use of traffic building software which basically does all of the methods mentioned above on autopilot. Certain website owners have invested in such types of software to bolster their traffic sources in addition to existing organic traffic generation methods.

5) Direct Response Marketing

Direct response marketing involves the use of offline marketing methods such as mailing letters, brochures and telemarketing. This method is usually used in addition to online traffic building methods to draw massive amounts of traffic.

With online marketing trends constantly evolving, it is important to stay on top of the latest trends in traffic building as search engines are constantly changing their search algorithm to prevent abuse by unscrupulous internet marketers.

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Market Samurai-The deadliest marketing tool ever?

Posted by admin on June 11th, 2010

I love this tool.  Sure you can use the built in Adwords Keywords tool for free but Market Samurai takes keyword analysis and niche idenfication to a new level.

Introduction.

As with all good tools Market Samurai is actually a suite of specialised tools which are integrated to allow complex analysis and cross-referencing to take place.

It also automates and this can save hours and hours of your time, allowing you to create more blogs/sites or other marketing.

In particular Market Samurai allows you to do the following:-

  1. Track Site Rankings
  2. Assess SEO competition
  3. Find and suggest keywords.
  4. Identify Domains
  5. Identfiy Content
  6. Publish Content
  7. Monetize Your Site

It is perhaps best known for the Keyword tool, this suggests additonal keywords, gives search volumes and best of all gives a whole lot of other data, allowing you to pick out the “low hanging fruit”  in terms of likelihood and chances of ranking for a particular keyword.

The keyword tool is actually available in the Free Trial version and this has got to be worth the time taken to subscribe and download.

Until recently this was the extent of my use of Market Samuari, however I am now drawn towards a little bit of site-flipping and the need to fill some of these sites with good content has led me to try the Find and Publish Content components of this great marketing tool.

What I was really surprised about, was the fact that you can actually publish content directly from the Market Samurai Interface into a Wordpress Driven blog without leaving the Interface.

Once your blog accounts have been set up, you simply choose the blog where you want the article to go and it will automatically post.  You can even choose the categories and add new blog categories remotely from Samurai’s control panel.

This feature alone will save hours of logging-in and cutting and pasting.

More to follow…

Download a Trial Of Market Samurai completely free of charge with no obligation.

Keyword Research.

In my opinion Market Samurai excels at keyword research and this is what I primarily use it for. The good news is that the Keyword Research part of the suite is free to use as part of the Trial Download (as of June 2010).

So, what does it do? In a nutshell, for any keyword or key phrase you type in the keyword tool will help you by:

Generating lists of alternative and associated keywords (uses the Google synonym tool).
Comprehensive analysis of those keywords and by comprehensive I mean it lists these metrics and stats:-
1 Search Volume Data
2 Adwords
3 Competition

Filtering and sorting of that criteria, so for example you can apply two filters to sort out those keywords with the highest search volumes and the least competition. In fact there is a superbly written article (available free from here) by Commission Blueprint which outlines the methods they use and the benchmarks they advise their members to use to find potential niche keywords.

The great news for you is that you can access this technique for free just by downloading Market Samurai and the free Commission Blueprint download-no strings attached. This is what I had been doing for the past 12 months or so and this met all of my keyword research needs.

More recently I have been developing some blog oriented sites and have recently upgraded to the full version of Market Samurai to take advantage of the content finder/publishing capabilities of the niche marketing software.

***add publish content here.

The good news is that there are still niche keywords out there, some with substantial volumes.

For example

usborne books with a search volume of.

****nick put screenshot here******

Of course finding the keyword/phrase is just the beginning of the journey you then need to evaluate your chances of ranking on the 1st page of Google, this is known as SERPs (Search Engine Results Position).

This is where the Competition Module of this marketing software comes into play.

Competition Module.

This part of the Market Samurai suite is used for analysing identified keywords and key-phrases for on your competitor’s pages.

To do this the tool analyses the Top 10 sites returned in a Google search for the keyword. (This is a similar method to the Internet Business Promoter analysis tool, although I use them slightly differently). This process is automated.

You are then presented with a wealth of data about those top ten ranking sites and domains these include:-

Domain Age
Backlinks
Blog links

*****Nick add to this

To simplify this process Market Samurai then colour codes the results (Red, Amber and Green), with Green signifying the more likely opportunities you may have to optimise your site for that particular keyword.

This online marketing analysis tool can be used to:-

Identify new keyword opportunities
Strengthen existing keywords which rank highly by monitoring the competition..

So let’s say that we have now identified the keyword and the places to add back-links to, which would increase our chances of success.

What do we need now?

We need some keyword related, original content. In an ideal world, you would write and optimised article yourself or commission an agent to write it for you.

If you are short of time another way to add content is to go to article sites such as ezine.com.

This can be a little laborious if you use their inbuilt searches and how do you know if the article would help your keyword and site?

Time to use the Content Finder/Publisher in Market Samurai.

The best part of this is that you can identify articles related to your niche keyword which have not yet been published anywhere else. Market Samurai will also report on the number of times the keyword appears in the article.

A quick word of warning here, make sure you understand the Terms of Usage for each of the article-supply sites, some just require a link, others require payment.

Monetizing with Market Samurai

If you are an affiliate marketer then you nee to know which keyword related products are available for your sites.

The software will find monetization products from

Clickbank
Amazon

It will also show you the commission earnings, the gravity and other criteria to sort and filter your results the way you want to.

Adsense

I personally don’t operate any Adsense campaigns on my sites, so I will just let you know that there is an Adsense component to Market Samurai. (This is a personal choice as I just find them irritating and often irrelevant) I should say this is within a “content” environment I often use them in the “search” environment as they can, on occasion, be more relevant than natural search results.

Domain Finder

This is a recently introduced integration of Domain Samurai and this now comes bundled with Market Samurai.

The two complement each other perfectly.

In particular this can help you find keyword relevant aged domains for your particular keywords.

General

I have been using Market Samurai for around 18 months now, both as the free trial for basic keyword research and more recently for deeper analysis of keyword competition and to find and publish relevant keyword content to blog style sites.

I always think that a good measure of any digital product is the updates and Market Samurai often has a new update and these aren’t just to fix minor bugs, they are often for increased usability and effectiveness or even the addition of a totally new and free component such as the Domain Samurai addition.

The software runs within the Adobe AIR framework, which can be a little slow to respond but does use real-time information gleaned from the web.

I personally use Market Samurai as my main tool to analyse niches, competition and find and publish content.

Once the site has been established for a while I then tend to use Internet Business Promoter to find and exchange links and to maintain and improve my keyword SERPs.

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Internet Business Promoter

Posted by admin on June 3rd, 2010

Internet Business Promoter

In my opinion and based on my actual use of this product.  Internet Business Promoter is the deadliest online marketing tool available today.

It is simply awesome at blasting the competition away and rocketing your website through the search engine stratosphere.

It is actually a suite of brilliantly designed products integrated to drive visitors to your site and get listed higher up in the search engines.

Each component of the product is literally a marketing tool in it’s own right.  In fact, Axandra the company behind Internet Business Promoter did actually buy out a company to include the link-building part of the IBP suite.

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