What is Email Marketing?

The name says for itself, Email Marketing is the use of e-mail for marketing communication purposes. Email marketing is a form of direct marketing where message is sent directly to the user. Email marketing is best to encourage customer loyalty and promote your online business.

Why is Email Marketing efficient?

E-mail is an efficient marketing tool, because it is a simple, quick, and cost-effective method to interact with current and prospective clients, customers, and investors. With Email Marketing, online marketers can promote certain offers and discounts, send newsletters, e-cards, new product notices, and maintain their existing advertising campaigns.

Email marketing provides the chance to:

• Save money. Time has proven that an email marketing program requires less investment comparing to printing and posting for traditional mail campaigns and other forms of communication.
• Save time. Once the message is thoughtfully created and the list of e-mail recipients is ready, you can simultaneously send the message worldwide to an unlimited number of people.
• Deliver the message straight to the customer. Unlike websites where people have to come to see your message, email marketing allows you to reach each customer directly.
• Generate sales leads. Email marketing is a permission-based promotion; it involves sending email newsletters to people that want and accept to receive them.

How to run a successful Email Marketing campaign?

1. Collect e-mail addresses from customers. The most important part of email marketing campaign is collecting customer contact list. You can gather e-mail addresses from customers who agree to be placed on your mailing list, from sales or service calls, from users when buying from your website or via a sign-up form on your website. As an alternative, you may consider appealing to an email marketing company that provides options for storing and managing an e-mail database.

2. Develop email marketing plan. When implementing an email marketing campaign, there are certain aspects you should consider:

• The look of your e-mails should match the website and should be created according to your niche.
• Target your niche to avoid your message to be sent into the “trash” section. Don’t send messages about Play Station III to an old lady who is interested in cooking recipes.
• Include relevant and clear information in your messages. If you offer something for free, make sure to actually have a free product or service, otherwise, you will just lose credit.
• Good email marketing campaign involves making customers to actually visit the site and become customers. Therefore, a good call to action message is a must.

3. Observe and measure your progress. Always keep your results on record in order to validate the expense of the email marketing campaign, and foresee the steps you need to take for the response rate to increase.

You can measure your email marketing campaign success by:
• Open rates – The number of people that opened your message.
• Click-through rates – The number of people redirected to your site by the link placed in the e-mail.
• Unsubscribe rates – The number of people that wish to discontinue correspondence with you.

Email Marketing is definitely a powerful weapon in your Marketing arsenal. Searching the right niche, providing quality information, calling the customer to action and monitoring the success makes Email Marketing a truly successful and greatly beneficial marketing strategy. However, keep in mind that Email Marketing is only effective if properly planned and organized.

The database gathers a lot of data generated on the website. The database is maintained through Database Management System (DBMS) that allows storing, entering, organizing, manipulating, retrieving and selecting data in a database. Database Management System helps to accurately present information to your website users.

In this article, we briefly describe some types of database for you to get a clearer understanding of database importance for a website.

Operational Database. Operational Database consists of detailed real-time data about all operations on a website. In operational databases the data can be changed, deleted and modified. For example, the operational database may include customer databases that record contact, credit or purchase info; and personnel databases that store information about employees.

Analytic Database. Analytic database is a static database which records and archives data (for example, sales/products information, publications/articles, etc) used for future analysis.

Distributed Database. Distributed database can include segments of operational and common user databases. Since the database is distributed, different users can access it without interfering with one another.

End-user Database. End-user database stores data developed by individual end-users. Some examples of end-user databases are collections of documents in spreadsheets, downloaded files, etc.

External Database. External database stores data for use across multiple organizations.

Every website that contains large amounts of data (images, photos, products, bibliographic info, statistical data, etc) should have a reliable and functional database management system in its structure.

The database of your website is just like your file storage cabinet.

Today, we explain the basics of writing good SEO content and SEO-friendly articles. Learn how to increase your website traffic with SEO articles, how to place keywords within the article, how to create powerful SEO titles, how to organize your article structure, and much more. So, if you do not have the budget to hire professional SEO Content Writers, then follow the advice given below!

SEO article writing – Tip 1

Meaningful and catchy title. When writing a SEO article, take time to create a meaningful and catchy title. The title of your SEO article should be as follows:

1) Unique, meaningful and catchy
2) Briefly describe the article idea/topic/etc
3) Include main keywords
4) Capture web surfers’ attention
5) Motivate to read

Note: Do not write the title when the article is not complete. Create the title when the article is done.

SEO article writing – Tip 2

Correct grammar and proper sentence structure. When your SEO article is done, take a fresh look at it and accurately proofread your writing to make sure there are no grammar mistakes. You can also get somebody else to proof read your article. Remember that any article that is stuffed with complicated sentences and spelling/grammar/punctuation mistakes can significantly hurt your website’s credibility.

SEO article writing – Tip 3

Attractive headline, headings, subheadings, and comprehensive article structure. Every SEO article should have a comprehensive structure and include a headline, introduction, body, and conclusion. Creating the catchy headline, headings and subheadings is useful for both readers and search engine crawlers. Do not forget to place keywords in your headlines, titles and subtitles.

SEO article writing – Tip 4

Links to other pages of the website. Your SEO article should point to your website home page and other pages/articles of your website to get it properly indexed. Use keywords and keyword phrases for the hyperlink text to maximize the importance of your keywords for search engines.

SEO article writing – Tip 5

SEO friendly URL. Search engine friendly URL is an absolute must if you want people from other websites link to your article. Search engine friendly URLs should not be lengthy, should not include unnecessary session IDs and generic names like “page1.html”. Get the most out of your SEO article and create meaningful, search engine friendly URLs with keywords.

SEO article writing – Tip 6

Use keywords and keyword phrases. Now comes the trickiest part of writing for SEO purposes: keyword placement and keyword density. If you write an article for SEO, keywords should be taken into consideration. To choose the main keywords, decide what words and phrases web surfers are likely to type in the search to find article like yours. Your SEO article should be readable, meaningful and beneficial for users; as well as keyword-smart, and never keyword-stuffed.

Writing effective SEO articles requires a fair amount of practice. With love, patience and time, you will be able to write high quality articles for your website’s SEO. And, the final tip for today: when creating an article for search engines, think of the readers first.

P.S.

Okay, okay, we never said writing SEO articles would be easy. Writing for SEO purposes is not easy at all, but it is not impossible either. Still want to write a heap of articles yourself? Or isn’t it easier to just hire a professional SEO Article Writer?

Oh, and just a side note for you in case you find yourself lost and looking for high-quality content writing services. Terranet has a team of SEO writing goddesses – three talented ladies who have strong skills in SEO Content writing.

Article Marketing is a popular, reliable and free method of Internet Marketing in which people write and distribute articles to promote their industry and businesses. In the world of online businesses, Article Marketing is used to improve search engine rankings and promote products or services. Submitted to popular qualitative article directories, an excellent, well thought out and well written article can generate click-throughs and bring a big number of visitors to the website.

Ok, now you think it sounds too easy to generate traffic with article writing, and wonder where the shoe pinches? Article marketing implies intense labor and time dedication. Article marketing can be time consuming and requires talent and a lot of patience. When writing an article you need to focus on certain details like titles, keywords, meta tags, accuracy, and creativity.

Despite hundreds of online marketing strategies and tricks, content is the king when it comes to Internet Marketing. But what is good content, you ask? Below, we provide essential article writing tips for successful article marketing:

Article Marketing Tip #1
One of the most powerful SEO techniques is writing unique and quality SEO articles. To be quality, unique and effective, SEO articles should be relevant, readable, beneficial for your visitors, done without spelling/grammar/punctuation errors, and KEYWORD-SMART. Follow this tip to build credibility for your web site via your articles.

Article Marketing Tip #2
Brainstorm titles that would best describe your article subject and attract user’s attention. Creating attractive titles that contain appropriate keywords makes part of good article marketing.

Article Marketing Tip #3
For an affective article marketing, your content should have keyword density, keyword frequency, keyword prominence, and keyword proximity.

Article Marketing Tip #4
Make sure to include backlinks (internal links) to your previous posts in your article. Internal links are among major attributes in article marketing that influence web site’s ranks in search engines.

Ok, so now you have spent time and effort to write pretty good articles and have followed all article marketing tips. However, no one ever gets to read your articles because of too low overall traffic of your website. What’s the right move to make this time?

Submit Articles To Top Article Directories

A smart yet simple move in article marketing is promoting your articles by uploading them to various popular Article Directories, which receive a high volume of traffic from search engines. Among top article directories there are: Ezine Articles, GoArticles, Article Dashboard, Articles Base Directory, etc. In order for the search engines find you easily, place backlinks to your website when submitting your articles to article directories. If your article is well optimized and well written, you will be pleasantly surprised to see your website traffic significantly increased. Article promotion is a simple yet effective article marketing strategy.

Article Marketing can be very rewarding. Well organized and well thought out Article Marketing works wonders. You can attract visitors to your website, build link popularity, increase your site’s search engine rankings, promote services, gain followers to your web site, and all that with article marketing!

Now you know how to create high quality articles that best serve your internet marketing purposes, so it’s time to take action and get great return from your article marketing efforts!

Good luck in taking your online business to the next level with Article Marketing!

The basic goals of 404 Error page are: identifying the problem, offering a solution, providing a way to report a broken link, and making the visitors keep surfing the website.

What Is Error 404

Error 404 page (aka PAGE NOT FOUND, or FILE NOT FOUND, or 404 Not Found page), is an HTTP standard response code displayed when a viewer asks for a web page that is not available on that website or did a mistake while misspelling the URL. Also, the 404 error page points out that the requested resource may be accessible again in the future. The 404 error should not be confused with “Server Not Found” error, in which a connection to the server cannot be made at all.

The code 404 stands for:
4 – Indicates a client mistake, for example, misspelling the URL
0 – Indicates a syntax or spelling mistake
4 – Indicates an error in 40x group

404 Error Page Tips & Suggestions

Generally speaking, creating a good 404 error page is not a big problem. Below, we provide some tips and suggestions to keep in mind when developing your own 404 error page.

• Develop a 404 error page with unique design, but try to make it similar with the design of your website
• Good 404 Error page should use friendly and smile-provoking language
• Good 404 Error page may contain links to the most popular pages of your website (FAQ, articles, sitemap, etc) and display the link to your website’s Home Page
• Good 404 Error page should provide a way for viewers to report a problem
• Good 404 Error page should provide a way for visitors to find the content and information they wanted
• Good 404 Error page can include widgets and search box

Develop attractive and user-friendly 404 error page which is not the dead-end street. Make sure your 404 error page is useful and helpful to your website visitors.

Basically, there are four concepts of keyword usage for SEO: Keyword Density, Keyword Frequency, Keyword Prominence and Keyword Proximity. Today, we explain these four keyword optimization techniques for you to tell the difference and understand the importance of each.

KEYWORD DENSITY

Keyword Density is the percentage of times a keyword appears on a web page compared to the total number of words within that web page.

There is no ideal keyword density for SEO, however, there is a common opinion in SEO community that the optimum keyword density is about 1% to 3%. The overuse of keywords is known as Keyword Stuffing or Keyword Spamming, which can get the web page penalized by search engines. Some say that the keyword density anywhere between 7% – 10% is effective. Some SEO’s tend to think that Keyword Density is a SEO myth and, in fact, it has no importance in the eyes of Google. Although the optimal keyword density percent still remains a controversial issue, the fact is that keyword density is beneficial for SEO.

KEYWORD FREQUENCY

Keyword Frequency is the number of times a keyword appears within a single web page.
The idea is that the more times a certain keyword is found on a web page, the more relevance a search engine will give that page for a search with that keyword. However, do not forget to use keywords naturally and wisely, in order to not get banned by search engines for keyword stuffing.

KEYWORD PROMINENCE

Keyword Prominence is how prominent the keywords are within a single web page.
Generally, the keywords that are placed early in the text and closer to the top of the page will be considered as more relevant in search engine’s eyes. Therefore, placing the important keywords at the beginning of the web page (or text, or sentence, or title, or meta tag) will give them the higher prominence and more value in the context of search engine optimization. Also, you can get the primary keywords bold, italic or underlined.

KEYWORD PROXIMITY

Keyword Proximity is how close two or more keywords are placed to each other.
General recommendation on improving your Keyword Proximity is placing the keywords close to each other. The closer, the better.

Any Search Engine Optimization campaign cannot succeed without proper Keyword Optimization. Keyword Density, Keyword Frequency, Keyword Prominence and Keyword Proximity are the golden rules in Keyword Optimization. And, the best thing about these keyword optimization techniques is that they WORK.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is one of the easiest and safest ways of making money online. In simple words, Affiliate Marketing is promoting or selling products or services offered by others, and receiving commissions in return. Affiliate marketing is an Internet Marketing practice of hosting links or banner ads on a website or blog, and then getting paid a fee or percentage of each sale. Affiliate Marketing is the business activity between Affiliate Merchants and The Affiliates, aka Publishers or Salesmen.

Affiliate Marketing Benefits
Affiliate marketing is equally beneficial to the merchant and the affiliate, since both sides can make money. Let’s take a closer look at some affiliate marketing benefits:

Low start up costs. Most affiliate programs are free to join and technical knowledge is not mandatory. Therefore, there is no financial risk associated with signing up to the affiliate programs.

No sales experience needed. Most marketers provide affiliates with ample support and assistance when it comes to providing marketing and sales material.

No inventory. Being an affiliate you do not need to create or develop your own products, nor have you stock the products. As an affiliate, your only concern is attracting visitors to the marketer’s website and increasing the conversion rate.

No need of Customer Support. It is the merchant’s responsibility to care about Customer Service and product shipping.

No work schedule. With affiliate programs you are your own boss. However, you are paid for results only, thus, time should be used productively.

Relationship Building. Affiliate marketing is about building stable and long-term relationships.

How to make money with Affiliate Marketing?

• Pay Per Click

A certain commission is amassed in the affiliate account every time a potential customer clicks on links placed on the affiliate website and are redirected to the merchant websites. The affiliate fee is normally between $0.02 and $1.00.

• Pay Per Sale

A certain commission is amassed in the affiliate account every time a sale is made as a result of advertising on the affiliate’s website.

• Pay Per Lead

A certain commission is amassed in the affiliate account every time a potential customer registers at the merchant’s website through the ad placed on the affiliate’s website.

The success of Affiliate Marketing depends on the amount of time and effort dedicated to the business. Affiliate Marketing requires proper research and good understanding of the product or service advertised. The trickiest part of Affiliate Marketing is increasing your Conversion Rate, in other words, getting your website visitors turn into customers. So, if you’re ready to make money online, Affiliate Marketing is the right way to go!

Online Customer Service is a range of services meant to assist the customers in making buying decisions and get customers informed about the products/services/etc offered by the website.

Excellent customer service keeps your target audience coming back to you and spread the word about your services.

Below, we outline some basic online customer service principles to help you manage your customer relations system and deliver the best services to your customers!

Customer Service Agent should have excellent communication skills
If you have already settled that your website will contain the customer service feature, you will have to hire a person with good communication skills. The customer support agent has to listen to the customer’s complains and needs, and assist in solving any problem. An excellent customer service representative should have good written and verbal communication skills, good and friendly speaking voice for verbal communication, and proper grammar for written communication.

Customer Service Agent should be a patient listener
One of the most vital parts of good customer service is being a good listener. The customer service agent should carefully listen to the client and handle the complaints with patience. Attentively listen to the customer’s demands and politely suggest potential solutions of the problem.

Customer Service Agent should treat each customer individually and politely
Customer Service agent should treat each client individually. Call the customer by the name, thank them and be honest and sincere during the communication process. Customer Service agent should keep in mind two basic rules of customer relations management: 1. The customer is always right, 2. Polite manner is an advantage for the company’s profit.

Customer Service Agent should learn how to express apologies
If you really care about your customers, let your customers always be right. Customer Service representative should learn how to express apologies correctly.

Customer Service Agent should take extra steps to give more than the customer expects
If you want your website to prosper, you should be unique in treating customers and provide them with services they won’t found elsewhere. Brainstorm what you can offer your customers that will be totally unexpected and making them coming back to your website.

Customer Service Agent should make clients feel comfortable to ask any question
Customer Service agent should make clients feel comfortable to ask questions, offer suggestions and express their opinion.

Friendly and well organized customer service is the lifeblood of any e-commerce website. Good Customer Service will help you outshine the competitors and lead your website to success. When developing your website structure and managing customer relations system, keep in mind the golden rule of effective Customer Service: Customer Service is all about treating others the way you would like to be treated.

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword (or, key phrase) appears on a web page in comparison with the total number of words on the web page/document/article, etc. To calculate the keyword density on the web page/ article/etc, use the following formula:

KD = (Keyword Count*100) / Total Word Count

For example, there is a 500 word article with 10 keyword uses. In this case, keyword density is (10*100)/500 = 2%

Many SEO specialists and SEO Content Writers consider the optimum keyword density to be anywhere between 1% and 3%. Keyword density which is more than 1%-3% could be considered as keyword stuffing or keyword spamming (overuse of keywords) which can get your web page banned from the search results.

There is a lot of advice and debate on keyword density out there, but the fact is that there is NO perfect keyword density percent. And, there is no hard-and-fast rule that can help and dictate 100% effective KD for SEO. Below we describe the very basics of keyword density and point out some ideas to keep in mind in order to find the golden mean.

Keyword Density Tip #1
Keywords should be used repeatedly, yet naturally. Even if your web page or text is keyword rich, you should remember to use the keywords naturally. The tricky thing is that the website content should be optimized for search engines while being also readable, meaningful and beneficial for humans. It’s not so easy, but it’s not impossible either.

Keyword Density Tip #2
Website content should be both search engine friendly and user friendly. When creating search engine optimized (SEO) content, it is important to keep in mind that keyword-stuffed content decreases the website’s (article, source, etc) trust and credibility in the eyes of the website visitors, and… in Google’s eyes, too.

Keyword Density Tip #3
Use keyword density at the start and at the bottom of a web page. Try to use keyword density in the top half of the page, in the first few paragraphs of the published text, and at the bottom of a web page (or, published text, or article). But, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use the keywords throughout the whole page content.

Keyword Density Tip #4
Do not overuse keywords. Do not keyword stuff. Overuse of the keywords is considered as keyword stuffing which can get your web page banned from the search results. Always take a moment to read your text before placing on your website. To test your website’s contents for keyword stuffing, read the content to yourself. If you meet the same word too often and it makes your head spin – then you’ve engaged in keyword stuffing.

Keyword Density Tip #5
Do not target too many (more than five) keywords per page. Although this SEO approach is definitely controversial, our practice shows that targeting one or two or maximum five words per page appears to be more successful in search engine results, then targeting multiple keywords per page.

Creating optimized content is like playing the lottery where you never get a 100% success guarantee. In the SEO lottery, keyword density is just like one of the lottery tickets. Developing meaningful, user friendly and relevant SEO content – which is keyword SMART but not keyword STUFFED – is the key to success in the eyes of both search engines and web users.

Keyword density is definitely one of most effective SEO tactics, but do not go “keyword density crazy”. As long as you use ethical SEO and keyword SMART content – Search Engines will appreciate you for doing the good job!

At any given moment of the day, the internet is always flooded with people impatiently searching for information and entertainment. Creating a website that would satisfy web users’ needs is the best way to profit. Now you are probably asking what are the most profitable websites to create?

Among the die-hard niches that continue to grow despite the economic condition there are affiliate websites, proxies, adsense websites, file hosting websites, auction websites, selling templates websites, online dating websites, online forum communities,  and fitness & health websites.

Let’s analyze the most profitable websites, step by step.

Affiliate Websites

One of the most profitable website opportunities are the affiliate websites. You may build a website that reviews affiliate products, place articles and comments about products of your niche. Product owners will most probably be happy to cooperate with you to extend the product, thereafter, share profits with you for the achieved results. You may also join forums within your niche to find more about products and things people are interested in, and to hunt for other possible affiliate opportunities.

Proxies

A proxy is a website that allows users to access and visit the sites that are normally blocked at the educational institutions, offices or other restricted networks. Millions of students are everyday interested in unblocking certain sites at school, thus, the demand for proxy websites is huge. Other benefits of owning a proxy website is that it is easy to set up and promote. Proxy websites are profitable businesses considering the fact that you can get traffic for free, it runs on autopilot, moreover, it earns revenue starting with day one.

AdSense Websites

Advertising has become a very efficient and popular form of attracting visitors. Marketers have come with the idea to create websites that display ads of a certain niche only. Adsense websites contain lots of web pages concentrated on a single keyword. The Adsense websites are not attractive to the users, however, they work perfectly for the search engines due to the abundant presence of links and keywords. You should pay great attention whether the topic or niche you have selected is in demand. The benefit of having such websites is that Adsense websites are easy to build and generate good traffic.

File Hosting Websites

Website hosting is a service offered by web hosts to store a site’s database and to publish it on the internet. Web hosts also takes care of the technical factors of the site that entrusted its database and makes the information available to everyone connected to the internet. By building a web host and storing someone’s information, you may charge a monthly fee. Creating a web host and gaining trust from other sites may be a very challenging task, however if you manage to do it, the results may be promising.  

Auction Websites

Auction websites are the virtual places where sellers and buyers gather to make offers and transactions, auction websites are the intermediary between the buyers and sellers. Amazon is a very profitable Auction website that earns lots of money by drawing commissions from all the sales made on a yearly basis, and from the banner ads placed on the website. You could apply the same technique and build your profitable auction website.

Selling Templates or WordPress Themes Websites

People are more and more concerned to get an online presence to survive competition, as a result, Website templates or WordPress Theme became more popular. For example, WordPress Themes can become a great solution for users who want their blog to be unique and unlike other web pages. WordPress earned a huge success because it has spawned an insatiable appetite for quality themes. If you are ready to spend time and create interesting and quality templates, you could also make a fortune.

Online dating website

The need to love and to be loved is a basic human need. People are more and more interested to find a companion  with the help of dating websites because it is easy to communicate and share information. You may build your own dating website and offer dating services even if you are not a computer savvy. Today the internet provides many low cost web commercial products and tools to help you build a dating web site. You can make profit by introducing a registration fee, only after your site becomes  visited and trusted.

Online Forum Community

Creating an online forum or community can take a little effort and a lot of time, but finally when you will end building your website you will be entirely rewarded. Building the online forum will be cheaper than it seems, because there are a lot of providers who will freely offer you the software and hosting.

Okay, the structure is understood but how about making money out of the online forum community? It all depends on the theme or the subject of the online forum. You may also introduce a fee for people who want to have access to it, or sell different feature that entertain users. You may think of creating a blog focused on a certain niche, and use it to promote ideas and place banner ads. To attract more viewers and to gain more profit, the online forum community has to be entertaining and informative.

Fitness and health

According to statistics, people are more and more interested in fitness and health. Fitness and health websites are in demand since people don’t have to pay for a gym membership, nor for a nutritionist’s consultation.  A fitness and health website that is concentrated on news and health articles about drugs and medications, diseases, weight loss, aging and other may generate good profit.

All of the above mentioned types of websites are highly profitable, but yet very competitive. To keep up with competition you are strongly advised to research, find your niche and entirely dedicate your time and patience when starting new website.

Good luck in building die-hard websites for profit!