Thursday, January 31, 2013

Promoting your eCommerce site step-by-step!


The following guide is more intended for people who are in that stage of launching their site for the first time or who haven't tried much in the way of promoting it so far. Many of these things you should have already done or thought about as part of building your website.

As always try the bits and pieces you like, skip the bits you don't or have already got in place or done or just aren't relevant to your business.

These headings will eventually be linked to detailed posts with instructions on what to do for each one.

Please note this is VERY much in a draft format at this stage

1. Install a webstats tool. Google Analytics is probably the industry choice.
2. Learn to look at view source for your web page.
3. Work out what niche you want to dominate.
4. Write down a list of keywords and keyword phrases relating to this niche that you want to dominate. Think like a customer.
5. Research these keywords and phrases on Googles Keyword Tool.
6. Think laterally. Experiment. Look at competitors sites and see what keywords they use via view source.
7. Refine and pick 3 or 4 two word phrases you want to dominate.
8. Run a link checker tool across your site - see how much a search engine robot could find.
9. Check / add .htaccess
10. Check / add robots.txt
11. Make sure your site has RSS feeds.
12. Make sure your site has a good site map.
13. Try and use text wherever you can instead of images
14. Try and use text links rather than image-based links for navigation.
15. If you use images make sure that the image is named after one of your keywords or phrases
16. Make sure your images have alt tags
17. Make sure your site passes as many web compatibility checks as possible.
18. Link a common element (eg logo) on ALL pages to site map
19. See if you can improve your base template to move body copy up source code. Go view source and see where your important information appears
20. For dynamic sites implement URL flattening code (worth looking into and easy to add) to make all dynamic URLS look like a html file. Often called Mod rewrite.
21. For any frames pages (if you decide to use any) add a site map and relevant content to the <noframes> tag. You might need some javascript to force the page back into frames if a user stumbles upon it via a direct link from a search engine.
22. Move fonts / positioning / style sheet code to external .css file
23. Style sheet name should reflect keywords targeted
24. Move any JavaScript code to external .js file
25. Create unique meta page titles for all pages targeting your keywords from.
26. Create unique meta keywords for all pages targeting your keywords from. This is now of low value.
27. Create unique meta description for all pages targeting your keywords from.
28. If your site is database driven get your developers to change it so it can generate unique page titles and metadata
29. Increase text content on major site sections - you want to be as text rich as possible
30. Use straight text (html) headings where possible rather than images
31. When you have text as a heading use <h1> tags rather than font size=2 tags
32. Add ALT tags targeting your keywords from 1. to all images
33. Change image names to reflect keywords for site section i.e. name your images after your keywords. eg balloons.jpg to fun_corporate_gifts.jpg
34. Create links from the site map to relevant DMOZ and Yahoo categories
35. Encourage other sites to link to yours where possible
36. Add a robots.txt file to the root directory of your site with allow all robots tag
37. Create a glossary of terms page that contains info about the business and its products and commonly used search terms
38. Create outbound links to major search engines
39. Once you have optimised your site, then submit it to Google, Yahoo and Bing.
40. Create Facebook site
41. Create Twitter site
42. Create Pinterest site
43. Link your RSS feed to Twitter
44. Post selection of products to Facebook site
45. Post selection of products to Twitter
46. Post selection of products to Pinterest
47. Create Google Adwords account
48. Set up Google Adwords campaign
49. Add your products and pricing to comparison shopping engines
50. When you have a little traffic and momentum run a heat-map tracking tool.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Internet Marketing in this World


Internet marketing is not only for promoting a website but also includes all the online activities like directory submission , article submission, SMO, PPC, etc that are useful for marketing the business over the internet. Now-a-days, internet marketing is a very useful technique to enhance the business and increase the website’s traffic also.

In today’s world, every business has a website to show customers what goods and services they are offering. So, to increase number of clients for your business, to enhance brand of company and offered products and bring more people to the website, Internet marketing is a very important aspect. Before promoting your website, you need to design an effective website which should have an easy access with good information and navigation. It is most important that if customer comes to the website they can easily find the required information and product details.

There are three basic types of Internet marketing strategies are used in today’s world. These are:

1. PPC (Pay Per Click): As name suggests, pay per click depends upon the service providers so that when someone clicks on your advertisement’s link, you will have to pay your cost per click each time. It increases the traffic to your website.

2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization): It is a technique by which you can customize elements of your website to improve search engine raking and get more traffic on your website. Both on page and off page optimization should be done so your website can compete for good ranking in search engines with your competitors.

3. SMM (Social Media Marketing): It’s all about promoting your websites, products and services on social networking sites like facebook, twitter, linkedin etc.

Some important tips for successful internet marketing Strategy are:

1. For successful internet marketing, your website should be top ranked in all major search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. In today’s world, more than 70% of online clients come to the website through search engines hence, for better ranking the website should be search engine optimized.

2. Email Marketing is also a good technique to let people know about the products and services that you are offering on web. Offshore software development companies with new websites specially should go ahead with email marketing to make their presence on web. In email marketing, email template and the way of conveying the product and service information is most important.

3. For dominating marketing niche on web, you should run good affiliate, reseller and associate programs. As these programs attract most of the customers on web and persuades them to join your service as affiliation service is good for both the service provider and customer.

4. You can also hire an internet marketing consultant or coach who can analyze your web site and online marketing strategies. If there will be any need for improvement they will guide you. There are some software development companies which provide SEO services. Through networking, you can find more clients for consulting and professional business services.

5. You should submit new articles related to your business in good article directories. By reading these articles people will also come to know about your services and will definitely have a look to your site.

6. Marketing your business in social networks is most important as people all over the world are connected via social networks like facebook, twitter, Linkedin etc. so that good amount of traffic can be generated from these social networks.

7. At last always run a blog related to your business where you can interact with the people and let them know what services and products are coming from your side for them.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Tips on How to Get Traffic to Your Website


It is very important to spend considerable amount of time and effort to research what it takes to set up as well as maintain a successful online business. Many people have tried and prepared since they were not prepared to work hard and were not determined enough to reach success.
These are the people who want the end result without doing anything. If you are really serious about starting your own business, you should be 100% committed to succeed.
Generating traffic to your site is one of the most important things you should be considering and working upon. There is no point in having a well designed website if no one can find it. With a number of ways to get traffic, sometimes it is difficult to work out which one would be the best to use. Here are some ways to quickly get traffic to your site for free.
Blog Commenting
By putting valuable comments on the blogs in your niche, you will be able to get great links to your website and this will encourage people to visit you. You just have to make sure you post interesting comments so people will get intrigued by your link. Simply post ten blog comments to get few hundred visitors. Because it will take just a couple of minutes to add a comment, it is an incredibly fast and easy way to generate traffic.
Social Media
Building a presence on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are also excellent ways to generate traffic to your website. You can start tweeting links out to your site or promote your business by having a Facebook page. You won’t believe how fast this can help you generate highly responsive traffic for your website.

Banner Exchange
If you have an advertising space on your site and you don’t mind sacrificing some revenues it could make, you might try to do an exchange with another site in your niche. You will do the same thing for them if they place your banner on their site. This can be a very simple way of getting free advertising. However, it will not work well if you depend on the revenue from your ad space in order to survive.
RSS
Setting up RSS feed on your site helps tell people each time you update your content. You can encourage online users to subscribe so they would come back to your website each time you update.
Forums
You will surely find one forum that is related to your niche. The best way to get traffic quickly would be to start posting in it and use as signature on the forum the link of your website.
These are just five of the many ways to generate traffic to your website. They are mostly preferred by successful online entrepreneurs because aside from the fact that they do not require initial cost, they are very easy to do as well and less time consuming. Most importantly, they are tried and proven to work.

Article Source

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Upgrade iPhone 4 App to iPhone 5

Recently, Apple launched iPhone 5 with its larger screen and new dimensions. It happens every year, but this time it comes with 4-inch screen which needs upgraded apps to fit with it. If you use iPhone 5 with those apps which were designed for iPhone 4, you’ll have letterbox with black bars on both sides of your phone’s screen. This is not good news at all for you. For that, you must get the upgraded version of those apps from the Appstore.

Developers are working hard to upgrade those apps to provide you an amazing experience of using bigger view of apps on screen. They are saying that the load of work completely depends on if the user interface of the app is inherently stretchable or not. For an instance, there are many applications that contain simple scroll views. In case of these apps, the upgrading work is very simple as they can easily remove those scrolling code and make it suitable for the screen size.

Here the scrollable region determines the amount of effort would be needed. But the apps which contained with the huge amount of graphic contents and minimum amount of scrollable region would need the most effort. Only the light on pictures and simple scrollable areas would need much less work.

Upgrade iPhone 4 App to iPhone 5
There an interesting way for the developers. They can keep all of the thinking behind by applying the extra space to doing something innovative. They should emphasize on the fact that how to utilize the extra space. What is the best thing they can do with that portion? Well, they can put extra buttons, or new contents for interacting with the app. And they must do something that is user friendly. Some may put all of the buttons to a single side so that it would be suitable for operating with a single hand.

Some apps can be upgraded with providing more information. In that way it can utilize the full space of the screen. For example, the weather app for iPhone Weddar was needed to be upgraded. The developer said that it was relatively very simple. There was nothing to do complex, it has been developed in such a way that they just come with more news on the new height space.

So, the upgrade process can be done simply if the layout of the app is simple. But the developers are not satisfied because they are doing this process without having any device in hands. And they have a lot of workload as many clients are handled by them and every client has a lot of orders.

Many people are there who don’t even know the fact of letterboxing. They will be installing the apps which are for iPhone 4 on the iPhone 5 and trying to find out what’s wrong with that device. For that, developers will have to face bad reviews if they don’t update these apps in time. Well, Apple is aware of this fact. They are ready to bring the upgraded apps as soon as possible.

Article Source : http://www.flyonit.com.au/upgradeiphoneapplication.html