Home-Based Business Tips

Great news if you are using WordPress!

If you are using WP and have been struggling with issues like quickly changing headers, backgrounds, fonts, removal of dates from posts, adding banner widgets, etc., there may be a perfect solution just hitting the “IM Streets” today.

British IMer Tony Shepherd has just released a free premium (therefore highly customizable) WP Theme called the Eazy Theme.

After signing up for the free Eazy Theme download (yes another optin list), you gain a personal use license allowing use on multiple sites (for your use only). I previously purchased Socrates (another premium theme) and paid $79 to have that capability. Tony is providing that for FREE!

If you want the developers license (allowing you to sell sites (site flipping) using the theme or use it on client’s site’s you may be building), you can purchase the developers upgrade for $47.00. There are a few training bonuses included with the package!

If you do not need the expanded license the developers option provides, remember that the multi-site, personal use license is included free!

You can check it out by clicking on the following link:

Eazy Theme

I’ve already downloaded the theme and activated it on one of my sites and I’ll keep you posted on my findings.

The best kind of traffic is free traffic, I think we can all agree on that.

There’s just this one little problem: Free traffic isn’t free.

At least, in most cases it isn’t.

If you’ve ever tried to rank for anything but the crummiest of low-traffic keywords in Google, you might have had a frustrating experience. Just optimizing your website certainly won’t get you there (and unless you’re in the top spots, you won’t see hardly any traffic).

So, you need to build backlinks, right? That’s what gets sites ranked in the big G. But if you go and submit a few articles, maybe do some social bookmarking and put your signature in a forum or two, that still doesn’t get your site anywhere near the top…

If you want to get sites ranked in the top spots in Google, you need some automation tools. It’s just a fact. You can’t build thousands of backlinks manually and unless you build thousands of backlinks, you won’t get good rankings.

And that’s why free traffic isn’t free.

Good link-building automation tools cost a fortune, often in the form of monthly subscription fees.

And so, to get a good amount of “free” traffic, you need to invest quite a lot of money.

But that’s about to change…

Backlink Battleplan is a system that teaches you how to build backlinks and it’s all about getting tons of top-quality backlinks, getting them automatically and getting them for free!

Click this link to check out the amazing offer and learn how to build backlinks.

This is a re-post of a great article on the importance of photos to enhance your own content as well as being a tool for driving targeted traffic to your site … Enjoy!

Increasing Website Traffic Through Google Images

By Adam Ada

Optimizing images is very important when optimizing any website or blog. If images are optimized correctly, they can bring a huge amount of traffic to your site. Image optimization is highly advantageous but the most underused when it comes to optimizing websites to increase rankings and traffic.

Depending on niche and images used, one may be able to attract a great deal of extra visitors easily with very little additional work. Following are a few points you can put into practice when optimizing your website:

1. Insert Keywords in your Alt text

This step is the most useful and important when optimizing images. Select a keyword or phrase which is relevant and popular to describe your image and web page. This alt text should be inserted in the code for your image file.

For example:

Here are a few more specific rules:

If the image is just decorated text, put the text in the alt attribute

If the image is used to create horizontal lines, bullets in a list or other similar decoration, it is fine to have an empty alt attribute (alt= “”)

If the image represents a lot of important information, try to summarize it in a short line and ass a longdesc link to a more detailed description.

2. Optimize the page with the image

Optimizing the actual page for search engines improves graphic images search. Search engines also look at text surrounding a graphic image to determine relevancy. It is recommended that descriptive text with your targeted keywords be placed immediately before or after the image itself. Also text within the anchor tag and next to the anchor text is especially going to influence image-search rankings. If you do a search for any term on Google Image, you’ll find a short description of around 20 characters below every image; the keyword is listed in bold as well.

3. Name images with Descriptive Titles

If you have an image of Bill Clinton, you could use the term “bill-clinton.jpg” to name your image file, instead of just using the original file name which could be something like “c789.jpg”. You can name the images exactly the same way as my alt text.

4. Determine overall content relevance using AdSense

This method can be used specifically used for Google Image Search. It is not very important to follow this but it is very useful to determine the relevance of your content with respect to your image. It will tell you how Google thinks about the overall theme of what your page is about. Keep changing your content until the AdSense unit on the page reflects the keywords you want to target. This method does not only apply to Google images but it is a generally a helpful method and it improves your overall latent semantic indexing. Your site will appear more relevant to Google for targeted keywords and phrases.

5. Use Social Site Tags for your images

If you are using images with little or no textual content, it will be useful to tag your images using internal tagging or social tags like Technorati. This may add more weight to your image and help it rank better. And if you are uploading your images using Flickr, remember to use appropriate keywords as well.

6. Make your image file accessible to search engines

Check that your robots.txt file does not restrict search engines from accessing your image files. Try not to use javascript links on image files as it will limit search engine access as well.

7. Hotlink Images from Google Search Results

Type a search query for the image you want. Then visit the original web page and copy the image location to your own website (hotlink it). Your website might show up high among image search results. Most of the images in the top row are actually hotlinked and rank better than the original image source. Well this method is frowned upon by most webmasters because it violates copyrights issues.

8. Use Images about ‘Hot topics’

Deliberately use images to catch visitors who are searching for hot topics or trending topics. Through Google Trends you can find this out. Make sure your content is relevant to the image used for more impact.

9. Add an optimized web page on your website and link the image to that page. Users can access this page via the ‘back’ anchor on the new page when they find your page through Google Image Search.

10. Monitor the Number of Indexed Google Images

An important aspect of Google Image Search optimization is to monitor how many images on your website are indexed by Google if you have taken the right steps to optimize your image. Just type site: vinfotech.com and check the images indexed for vinfotech. Instead of vinfotech.com, just type in your website to get indexed images.

The author of this article represents a professional
Social Networking Website Design and Social Networking Web Development company. It also offers design and development solutions.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Adam_Ada
http://EzineArticles.com/?Increasing-Website-Traffic-Through-Google-Images&id=3880823

The “Marketing Guru” Seth Godin provides another of his insightful interviews discussing the “New Face of Marketing” in the 21st Century.

Through the interview, Seth Godin describes how it is necessary to “tell a story” to the consumer in such a way that they believe the story and sell themselves.

During his explanation, Godin names three key factors each story must have to enable the consumer to be “self-sold”:

• First, the story must provide something the consumer wants;
• Second, the story must be true and authentic; &
• Last, the story must be remarkable ….

Watch the video below and listen to the marketing master reveal the details of selling via story-telling:

Now take your notes and spin your yarns (authentically and remarkably of course) and apply this insight into your own home-based business marketing efforts ….

One of the first pieces of advice many home business owners get when inquiring about online marketing approaches is the need to establish a blog.

As with anything else on the Internet, there are several paths a budding online marketer can take when preparing to establish a blog site.

Two of the more popular blogging options are to use either a free blog service like Blogger.com or WordPress.com or a self-hosted WordPress blog that has been installed on the users own website.

The following video was prepared in support of the “Build Your Own Site” page found elsewhere on this site, which provides a written overview along with a set of tutorial videos on how to set-up self-hosted WordPress.

In this video I  introduce you to each of these three different blog options (Blogger.com, WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress) and discuss the pros and cons of each type:

If you didn’t know it, I became a very big Seth Godin fan after reading his penultimate book released late in 2008, “Tribes – We Need You to Lead Us”.

Right after I started reading the book, I was so blown away I subscribed to his blog (strangely named – Seth Godin’s Blog) to monitor his nearly daily postings of marketing advice and pure gold nuggets.

As I opened my email this morning, his latest post was waiting in my in-box; the title instantly caught my eye.

After reading through the short but powerful piece, I quickly decided to add it to this blog (with the appropriate links back to the original in case you would like to subscribe yourself)!

So without further hesitation ….

Pay for stuff (by Seth Godin)

As a bootstrapping entrepreneur, my instinct has always been to work before spend. If there was a way to spread the word virally instead of buying ads, I would. If there was a way to change the project so I could do it myself, I would. If I could trade or whittle my way into getting an asset on the come, I would. That’s the mantra of the bootstrapper.

It turns out that paying for stuff works too.

Ads that pay for themselves are worth buying. Employees and freelancers that produce more than they cost are worth hiring. Office rents that generate productivity, foot traffic or revenue are probably worth paying.

In the free media world in which we’re living now, it’s so easy to get stuck on not investing, on avoiding outlays at all cost. Frugal is an admirable trait, but being a miser is dumb.

An interesting message don’t you think. Definitely more gold business/marketing advice from Mr. Godin.

Many, if not most of us, who are trying to leverage the Internet to assist in building our home-based businesses are likely guilty of what SG discusses above (I know I am).

This piece was enough of a wake-up call for me to commit to re-evaluating my daily “Net-related” activities to determine how to best balance my time and marketing budget (yes I actually do have one).  Perhaps this is something you may want to do as well to insure you are best applying your resources.

Something we often seem to forget …. In any business, time is indeed Money!

As Bob Dylan once wrote and sang … “The times they are a-changin‘” and a digital shift many initially thought a mere fad; social media is proving it is not only here to stay but it has started an outright revolution!

The following video by “Socialnomics” provides not only an entertaining view of social media’s impact on both our life and business; it is an extremely powerful one as well …

Give a watch, then reflect about the potential impacts to your business marketing strategy …

If you would like to learn more about “Socialnomics” or check out the background sources for the video, visit the site by clicking on either link above (both name references are active).

What’s your next move?

Either subscribe to the RSS feed or email notifications for this blog to be the first to hear about new articles on social media marketing strategies, techniques and trends as they periodically hit the new post position!

As a home-based business owner interested in online marketing in the 21st Century, you may well be struggling with the “techie” details about websites and then how to gain great page position on search engine results.

Many people will provide great advice regarding the use of blogs as your initial website platform for reasons discussed on a previous post on blog traffic.

Beyond the fact that blog sites can be magnets to both people and the search engines like Google, blogs make great focal points (also referred to as central hubs) for your online marketing efforts.

Using a blog as your central hub enables you to build a “Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine” as described by Charles Heflin of Social Media Sciences in the following video:

Hopefully you noted Charles describing the steps required to build a “Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine” including posting quality blog content to your central hub, then syndicating the content via your social networks and creating social buzz.

Want more insight on the process and the “how to” of combining quality blog content with syndication of that content via your social networks to generate social buzz and build your own “Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine”?

Click on the “Social Media Science” banner link located on the right-hand sidebar to gain access further information about SMS and the Synnd Network.

I have personally used this system to gain fantastic search engine page position and drive traffic to blog sites less than two weeks old!

The power of this system and approach is truly amazing and completely revolutionary!

So elevate your home-based business Internet marketing game to 21^st Century standards and combine the power of content syndication and social buzz and kick your “Perpetual Internet Traffic Machine” into high gear today!

Today, most home-based business owners are interested venues to market their products or services via the Internet.  One of the main tools used as a focal point to Internet marketing efforts is a dynamic website called a blog.

And once you understand the basic blog traffic techniques and a few secrets on increasing traffic to a new blog, gaining great search engine page position is a snap!

Blogs, Marketing on the Web & Traffic Techniques

Why is there so much attention to blogs as central hubs for online marketing efforts?

Simply due to the fact the most effect blog sites deliver a steady stream of value-oriented content that both the prospective customers and search engines like Google absolutely LOVE!

This provides a one – two punch since the prospects become steady readers gaining more exposure to your online marketing/sales process (mostly where they are selling themselves) and the search engines thrive on finding fresh, quality content.

Great … just hop onto your computer and fire up a new blog, post a steady stream of quality content and “they will come”, right?

Well not quite ….

A significant obstacle awaits most newly launched blog sites since it typically takes a fair amount of time (sometimes months) for the site to get found and indexed by the search engines before gaining decent page position.

So the main goals when starting a new blog include: getting found by the search engines; gaining search engine page listing position; and ultimately increasing traffic to that new blog more quickly than the norm.

Is it possible to expedite the process?

Absolutely, at least it is with a little helpful insight …

In the video below, I identify some of the “secret” tips to gain fast search engine recognition and obtain page one position for a number of posts on a blog that was less than two weeks old (launched May 2009).

(The actual blog site is “Nature’s Green Remedy”: http://naturesgreenremedy.com .)

During the video, I also showed a few of the keyword phrases that gained page one position within 24 hours when all the techniques were used including:

• green remedy
• nature’s green remedy
• green fishing tips
• personal perspective green living
• cleaning products and green lifestyle.

We hope you found the information helpful and intriguing!

One of the growth markets discussed on the previous post is the “Wellness Industry”.  Many people believe this is definitely one market to be considered when researching potential home-based business opportunities.

A few years ago, leading economist and author, Paul Zane Pilzer wrote a book entitled: “The Wellness Revolution” where he predicted increasing health concerns by baby boomers would propel growth of this market for the next several decades.

In the following video, Pat Robertson interviews Mr. Pilzer about the factors at work behind this revolution to enhancing wellness and how it will distinctly benefit the individual entrepreneur and home-based business owner:

For those of you researching the different types of home-based business opportunities, Pilzer makes a clear case for considering an opportunity with a wellness component as you begin your own revolution on the track to personal freedom!