Submitting your web to online web directory, like this site, is one of the most effective ways to promote your web site. It will increase your web popularity and your web position in search engine like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. But it is not enough. There are many other others web promotion techniques that you can do to promote your web site.

To help you, webmaster or web marketer, promote your web site, we will publish selected articles on web marketing. Hopefully, these articles will help you, especially new webmasters, to learn important techniques and method in web promotion.

A press release is an announcement of something newsworthy that is submitted to journalists and other media representatives.

By submitting a press release you can instantly create a buzz with your message and receiving a boost of traffic to your site.

You could submit a press release about you, your business, a new site, blog or product launched. This could be anything to do with your business.

When creating a press release, there is a certain format you have to follow. But before you create your press release, you want to keep in mind of the Five W’s: Who, What, When, Where and Why.

Your readers want the facts. You don’t want to sound even slightly like an advertisement. There’s other advertising methods for those – don’t include it in your press release!

Here is the standard format for a Press Release:

1) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – place in upper left hand margin and use all capital letters.

SKIP ONE OR TWO LINES

2) Contact Information – include your name (or press contact’s name), title, telephone and/or fax numbers, email and website address.

SKIP TWO LINES

3) Headline – use a catchy, attention-grabbing headline. Headline should all be in bold text.

SKIP TWO LINES

4) Lead Paragraph – this is where you include the all important Five W’s giving the main points of what your press release will cover.

SKIP TWO LINES

5) Text – this is the main body of your press release in which you will expand on your message here.

SKIP TWO LINES

6) Re-cap – here you want to re-state or summarize your message, including any highlights such as product release dates or place your site’s url again for good measure.

The worst thing that will happen is your site will receive an incoming link from a high ranked site.

Other tips on creating your press release:

• should be no longer than once page in length
• use short sentences and double space between your lines
• proofread it many times to ensure there is no grammar or spelling mistakes (don’t look unprofessional)
• your headline and lead paragraph should grab your audience’s attention

Other ideas for creating your press release:

• new contest or sweepstakes at your site
• an interview with an expert for your topic
• new membership or forum
• a free product you’re giving away
• if your business has received a reward
• results of a survey or poll that you hosted
• a coaching course or event that you hosting or associated with.

There are many other ideas you could use when creating your press release. These are just some to get your started.

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In the ‘good old days’ – about three years ago – you used to keep in-touch with your customers using phone calls, email messages and face to face meetings. Nowadays the world has changed. People expect even more frequent updates, yet it’s nearly impossible to meet with every business contact on a regular basis.

Thankfully, blogging has come to the rescue. Setting up a blog on your web site – and having an associated RSS feed – means you can keep in constant touch with your clients and potential customers. Plus you don’t have to email them and they can get your latest news without having to visit your web site.

So how does this all work? A blog is really a fancy name for a web page that gets updated regularly. It’s nothing special. There are several methods of writing ‘blogs’, but they are nothing more than computer programs which allow you to easily update a web page. Far and away the easiest way to start a blog is with a website called blogger.com.

However, for keeping in touch with your customers, RSS is the key. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What this means is that your blog can be automatically delivered to people who want to read it – you don’t have to send it to them and neither do they have to come and collect it. All they need is the address of your RSS Feed and their RSS Newsreader can do the job for them. There are several RSS readers available and new web browsers incorporate the ability to read RSS feeds and keep them updated.

Whenever you add new content to your blog, the RSS Feed automatically gets updated in everyone’s Reader program or web browser. That means you are guaranteed to be able to keep in touch with clients and prospects. You don’t have to do anything other than produce the content. Equally, you don’t face the problems of email filters and anti-spam programs blocking your email. Furthermore, people tend to read RSS Feeds because they have subscribed to them whereas they tend to ignore non urgent emails.

As you can see, there are several advantages to Blogs and RSS Feeds. But it doesn’t stop there. Search engines love them. That’s because blogs provide fresh and new content – precisely what searchers are looking for. Hence the search engines are actively pushing blogs higher up the search engine ranking. This means if you don’t have a blog for your business, you are seriously reducing your chances of a high search engine ranking. You need a blog nowadays to get noticed by the search engines.

So, blogging is essential. Not only does it improve your web presence, it also means you can keep in touch with clients and prospects more easily. And all the marketing research you can find will tell you that keeping in regular touch with your customers is an important component in gaining new business. So get blogging!

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If you are trying to sell things on the Internet and you do not have a blog you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. Would you go to play golf without a putter?

Your competition is blogging and they are beating your pants off every day with ease. A part of blogging is submitting your articles to social directories.

Here are the reasons social marketing must be a part of your Internet business.

1. Social marketing is a popular way to get information. Directories like Digg and Netscape are quickly becoming the choice of people all over the world as a way to keep up to date on what is going on. If you are not blogging and submitting to relevant social directories you are missing out on this easy form of traffic.
2. Social marketing is easy to do. Here’s what you need. You should get a WordPress blog and set it up so that you can quickly bookmark the top directories. Then you should post in your blog everyday. If you can talk and type you can blog.
3. Social marketing is an interactive way to develop relationships with your readers. This has become know as Web 2.0 and it is important to the future of your business. People still like to deal with people. This is an age-old sales trick that sometimes gets lost on the Internet. By making yourself and your blog interactive you become a real person. This will help increase your chances for sales and repeat sales.
4. Search engines love social marketing. You are making their life easy when you blog around keyword rich topics that a person researching can find. When you master the techniques of social marketing you will find you can get on page one of Google and other search engines very quickly.

The reason for this is search engines are spidering Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and many more non-stop looking for fresh relevant content to put online. This may as well be you as opposed to your competition.

If all of this seems confusing it really shouldn’t be. Read “The Authority Black Book” by Jack Humphrey. It is a free ebook you can get online. In it you will learn everything you ever wanted to know on social marketing and how to use it to increase your business.

Do not wait until tomorrow to get started. Do it today and your Internet business will thank you.

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Internet marketing is a complicated business. There is so much to learn. Building websites, learning search engine optimization, emails, autoresponders and that is just some of it. Then you have to find your niche, research your market, dream up your product and on and on it goes. Then just as you think you have figured out your blueprint along comes another indispensable tool or system. So you make a few adjustments and read another 150 pages of instructions and watch another 20 hours of high powered video. Phew! You take a deep breath and rewrite your blueprint. You turn on the computer and check your emails. There are 65 emails all heralding the latest and greatest in internet marketing. Spy on your opposition, buy these private label rights and do not forget to listen in to the latest over hyped teleconference with two or three self proclaimed gurus thinly disguising mutual backslapping for selling some over priced “how to” book which is probably just another rehash of what you learned two or three months ago.

Have you ever wondered if this is a cleverly orchestrated plan by the successful operators to confuse the would be marketers out there. Maybe not but it does sow the seeds of utter confusion into the minds of the unfocused.

The fact is your email inbox is a major distraction to actually getting on and achieving success in internet marketing.The answer here is to limit severely the amount of email you read. Go through the list of emails you receive and unsubscribe from most of them. Be thoroughly ruthless and just retain one or two of your very best newsletters. It is probably going to be painful because you enjoy receiving them and will spend hours reading them and the things they promote. But that is the point, they have actually distracted you and robbed hours of your time.

Now it is time to focus and select that aspect of internet marketing that you enjoy. Go for one thing and get it going properly and then expand into the next thing in a natural progression that will best compliment your first interest. Follow your prepared blueprint and focus on that. Do not be totally deaf to what is going on in the internet marketing world but limit the destructively distracting nature of so much of it.

So concentrate and focus on achieving your goals and making some money. Join a good mentoring program if you really need to but stop hopping from one thing to the other. Be single minded and maintain that focus. When you have achieved your initial goals and have things running on some sort of auto pilot then you can look around for ways to improve and fine tune your business.

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Building backlinks to your website is highly recommended in the Internet marketing community these days. This practice is especially helpful for the purpose of drawing organic (read “free”) traffic to your website. And, if you don’t have traffic to your site, you don’t have much if earning money is your goal.

By building backlinks to your website, you benefit in a number of ways. First, your placement in the search engines can improve, since the number of backlinks pointing to a website appears to have considerable impact on search engine ranking (love). Second, you may also attract traffic, as visitors on the other sites see your link and click over to see what you’re offering.

The rest of this article will focus on several backlink building methods that are great for beginners and experienced marketers alike.

Social Bookmarking

There are now literally thousands of social bookmarking sites. These sites offer an opportunity to bookmark all of the websites (including yours) that you find interesting and want to keep track of. Bookmarking your site often means you’re creating a backlink too.

Website Directories

These also are in great supply. These sites are storehouses for information about all sorts of websites, sorted by topic. Many allow you to submit your website for inclusion for free and create a backlink if your website is accepted.

Link Exchanges

These are also known as reciprocal links. You allow me to put my link on your website and I allow you to include your link on my site. Reciprocal links are considered more valuable if they are placed on a website whose theme is relevant to yours.

Blog Comments

Many blog owners welcome readers’ comments in reaction to their posts. The reader can generally include a website link along with their comment, creating a backlink. Just watch out for blogs that include the “no follow” tag because then the backlink won’t count.

Press Releases

Submitting a press release entails writing up a short news story about your website or some of its content. It’s a who, what, when, where, and how of something likely to be of interest to the media. As with many of these methods, there are free and paid options. Of course you include a link to your site in your content.

Article Marketing

Some say article marketing is the best method to draw free traffic and ultimately lots of backlinks. The webmaster writes an article on a topic relevant to their site and submits it to one or more article directories with a resource box incorporating links pointing back to the website.

Link Networks

These are typically private networks of blogs or websites on which members can post content which includes a link to their website. Often the blogs that are available in these networks have a fairly high page rank, say PR5-PR7, which is an attractive feature. The value of a backlink can increase if it is placed on a web page with a higher page rank

Using all of these methods at the same time to create backlinks might lead to being scattered and ineffective. If you’re interested in building links to your website, start with one method, complete it thoroughly and then move to another.

Of course some of the techniques, like article marketing, are never complete. There is always room for more, so intersperse this with other link building methods. With some concerted effort you will be able to create hundreds or thousands of backlinks to your website and really feel the search engine love.

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When looking to start or grow an existing Internet business or even offline business there is one fact you cannot get away from. That simple fact is without traffic your business is going nowhere. This simple truth is universal to all Internet businesses and is tantamount to building a Wal-Mart on the moon it could be the biggest and best-stocked store ever but if no one can get there it is dead before it starts.

One of the best ways of promoting an online business and enhancing an offline business is with the use of web business directories. There are a few key benefits to this for your online and offline business and in this article we will look at some of those key benefits. Among these is the main lifeblood of business and that is traffic, directories can help generate this in a few key ways.

The first benefit to both on and offline businesses are web business directories. These are among some of the highest trafficked websites on the Internet with some of the highest Alexa rankings there are. The largest of these directories and probably the best known would be Yahoo.com another large directory would be DMOZ (The Open Directory Project).

Alexa is a division of Amazon.com and it runs a web traffic rating service that ranks a website’s traffic with the ideal ranking being number one. Some of the websites with high (actually the lower the number the better) traffic rankings are Yahoo #1, Ebay, MySpace, YouTube and Google.

The reason this number is important to potential web business directories you are looking at is traffic, these sites get lots of it. This is good for you as many people look to directories to find what they are looking for over search engines for the key difference between them. Based on human editors almost no web directory databases use robots as where search engines employ robots called bots, which use mathematical algorithms to index websites.

Many people consider the human element of a web directory to equate to a higher quality of listing as a human can notice simple subtleties that a computer just cannot notice. This human factor is what also gives the sites a higher authority ranking expressed through the high Page Ranks most established web business directories enjoy. Why is this Page Rank factor important to you and your business? Simply put Google gives greater credibility to sites through higher Page Ranks expressed on a scale of PR0 to PR10 with ten being the highest you can achieve.

When you list your site in a directory with a high PR some of that Page Rank passes on to your site and in essence it boosts your Page Rank which helps improve your results in the SERP’s (search engine results page). This brings it all full circle as the higher your score in the SERP’s the more traffic your website will get. The number of incoming links you have to your site (back links) directly relates to your position in the SERP’s. Simply put the more one-way links you have the better your websites traffic will be.

What benefit is this to your offline business you may ask? Simple. As the world embraces the technology of the Internet and more and more people turn to it for solutions to problems the more your business presence on the web becomes increasingly crucial. Many people use web business directories as the modern day Yellow Pages. These directories can have advanced listings capabilities which can be anything from a few lines to extremely detailed business information such as business phone, address, product listings, photos of the business, etc.

This is an affordable way for an offline business of getting an online presence without actually having to build their own website. It can give the offline business a quick and simple way to join the modern way of doing business to a generation that is as comfortable doing business online as their parents were with a telephone.

They use the Internet as a way of gathering information to save time and make more informed decisions when they do chose to spend their hard earned money. In the end it boils down to this, web business directories are a way of connecting businesses and customers together in a more efficient way and to a larger, more informed audience.

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Squidoo has been part of the new Web 2.0 category of internet marketing tools since 2005. Squidoo allows an author to create a lens, a one page website, which focuses on any subject for free. A particular lens can draw information from numerous sources and place it all on one page for easy viewing and reading.

A lens maker can create numerous lenses on a subject, focusing attention on a different aspect of the subject with each lens. On the other had, a lens maker can make numerous lenses that cover many different topics, reflecting the lens makers’ different interests and expertise.

Internet Marketing

One of the many good uses for Squidoo lenses is to use the lens as part of an overall internet marketing strategy. One or more good lenses can help to bring attention, traffic, and credibility to a product or business by providing valuable information and resources. Additionally, the lens can help to establish the author as an expert in their field and a person whose advice should be taken seriously.

The single page websites that Squidoo allows an author to create are called lenses because the finished website focuses on a single subject or idea. This focused attention on a subject is very attractive to users of the internet who are constantly searching for answers to questions or problems. The internet search engines whose job it is to find good, focused websites that will answer the questions or problems are attracted to the lenses.

Therefore, the use of Squidoo lenses has become a valuable internet resource for building and marketing a business.

Basic Modules

There are numerous tools available on Squidoo to build a lens. Most of these tools are called modules. The modules create separate sections on the overall web page. Other tools available on Squidoo include the author’s biographical area, a keyword list called tags, the lens title or headline, a lensroll, and RSS subscription for readers.

One of the basic modules allows the author to write short articles about various aspects of the lens’s subject. Another basic module makes it easy to list and describe appropriate links to offsite information that complements the subject of the lens. For internet marketing purposes the author can use these basic modules to link to their own websites, thereby driving traffic to their own business.

Other basic modules provide links to commercial internet resources such as eBay, Amazon, Starbucks, CompUSA, and many other businesses where the reader can be directed to the author’s own merchandise offerings or to merchandise and information that supports the author’s own business. These modules can also provide some income, as the lens maker earns a small percentage of the sales of merchandise on these commercial websites.

Interactive Modules

Many modules are interactive in nature, which is why Squidoo is considered to be part of the new Web 2.0 category of interactive websites. Readers can respond to many of the modules, adding their own favorites to certain categories. For example, readers can add their favorite YouTube videos to the list of videos on the lens or add their favorite pictures to the lens’s list. Additionally, readers can add their favorite links to a list of links that the author has provided on the lens, or they can add their comments or responses to questions asked by the lens’s author. One of the favorite interactive modules is the voting module where readers can vote on a question by the lens’s author or vote on a listing of favorite resources.

All of the interactive modules have the effect of creating new content for the lens. The benefit to the lens maker is that the new lens content makes their lens more searchable by the many internet search engines. This is an obvious boost to the lens maker’s overall internet marketing strategy.

Syndicated Content Modules

Another category of modules is that of syndicated content that is drawn from other websites. For example, if the lens maker has a blog on the same subject as his lens, he can have the blog posts automatically directed to the lens each time he creates a new blog post. Other types of syndicated content include articles from magazines and newspapers. The lens maker can automatically draw content related to the subject of the lens each time a new article appears in the specified periodicals. Similar to reader interactivity, this constantly changing syndicated content refreshes the lens on a regular basis, making it more attractive to the internet search engines and giving a boost to the lens maker’s internet marketing efforts.

Creating a Squidoo lens can be fun as well as wise. It is fun because the tools produce a lens with a wide range of variety and creativity. And it is wise because the lens will help the lens maker market their business more successfully.

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What would happen if one of your friends tells about your newest blog to her five friends and they, in turn, tell their friends and it goes on like this? Pretty soon you will have all the traffic you need for a comfortable income from your new-found writing careers. Is it possible to to achieve this kind of success using the virality of the social web, or does it sound like a pyramid scheme?

The emergence of social web provides opportunities for viral marketing that never existed before. Face to face talk or talk over the phone has its limitations in reaching your audience. The Web 1.0 offered forums for a limited viral marketing opportunity. The social web has opened up avenues many folds expanded online reach. This article describes seven techniques for using the social web to achieve virality.

1. Before jumping to social websites to launch your viral adventure, make your site social web friendly. Provide a link on your site for users to invite their friends. When someone joins your site through an invitation, reward points to the inviter. Announce a contest on your site and reward the top inviter with e-books or a t-shirt with your site logo.
2. Spend sometime at Digg. This is a community based news popularity web site. If your blog article hits the front page of Digg, you will get thousands of visitors and some of them will eventually become your regulars. Study the types of articles that end up on the front page of Digg. Write your blog articles targeted to Digg users.
3. MySpace is the ultimate social website because of its sheer size in terms of visitors. If you have lots of friends who have their MySpace pages, create a niche network community in MySpace with common interests. Post teasers of your interesting blog articles in your MySpace page with links to your full article. Ask your friends to write comments on your blog postings.
4. Take a look at Delicious. Google Delicious to get the url because it is not a dot-com domain. It is a social bookmarking site to store your bookmarks online. You should build a network of friends at this site and study their bookmarkings to assess the type of articles they prefer to bookmark. Tailor your blog articles to mimic the article style your network appreciates.
5. Visit a site called Squidoo. At Squidoo you create “lenses” (a Web page) about any topic. You can create as many lenses as you want and you can embed external links in your lenses. Squidoo lenses also have a good search engine credibility. So, your sites will get some good external in-bound links for free.
6. LinkedIn is an online community of experienced professionals. Create your account at LinkedIn and network with professionals in your fields. Offer some free services for other professionals in your network and solicit their recommendations. All recommendations appear in your profile. LinkedIn provides great opportunity for someone to find your business or services.
7. YourElevatorPitch provides a free online spot to announce your business and services. User rates your ad pitches. This site also allows you to link back to your site.

Other sites worth exploring for viral opportunities are Flickr and YouTube. Both the sides accept multimedia (photos for Flickr and videos for YouTube) contents. These sites are good for establishing your brand by regular posting of theme oriented humorous contents.

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Whether you run a business totally online, or you operate a brick-and-mortar business and have a supplemental website, you need to implement article marketing. If you aren’t marketing your business with articles, you’re missing a huge chunk of the marketing pie. Let me give you a few reasons why.

Reason #1: Article marketing is free. Every business owner knows that advertising isn’t cheap. Every newspaper or magazine ad you run costs you dearly. By spending just a little extra time writing and submitting several articles each month, you’ll save quite a bit of money. Best yet, article marketing doesn’t cost you a dime—just a few hours every week.

Reason #2: Article marketing brands your business. Have you ever wondered how some businesses seem to become so well-known in such a short amount of time? They’re getting their name out there. They’re giving away something of value for free to their potential customers. Your articles will brand your business and make it a well-known name.

Reason #3: Article marketing makes you an expert. If you write articles about the subjects you know well, you’ll quickly become known as an expert in your field. Do you run a website on bird watching? Writing and submitting fifty articles on bird watching will show people that you know what you’re talking about.

Reason #4: Article marketing teaches you how to relate to people. You can’t write a bunch of articles without learning how to communicate effectively. The more you write, the more you’ll learn how to get your message across in a friendly, personal tone.

Reason #5: Article marketing creates back links to your website. Without getting into the technical details of this, back links to your website are good and you’ll want lots of them. Back links help boost your rankings in the search engines, thus gaining more exposure for your website.

Remember that article marketing isn’t the cure-all answer to advertising your business; it’s one piece of the pie. You also can’t submit a handful of articles one time and expect to see results.

Article marketing requires persistence and patience. You should plan to spend a certain number of hours each week writing and submitting articles to promote your business. Pencil in this time faithfully and stick to it. Within a few months (maybe even a few short weeks!), you’ll begin to see the results of your hard work pay off.

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If you are setting up a website, follow these simple rules to improve search engine rankings of your site. You can also follow these techniques if your website is not ranked high in search engines for certain keywords. Concentrate on the home page of your site and once you learn the techniques, you will be able to apply them to the other pages of your site that will have multiple high ranking pages.

1. Find keywords (or key phrases) relevant to your website. Go to the overture keyword selector tool (type key phrase overture inventory in Google) and check the popularity of the keywords you want to use. Avoid highly popular keywords. Highly popular keywords are very competitive and the least popular keywords are search engine traffic starved.

Select a dozen keywords and key phrases from the middle of the list. This is a very important exercise and you should spend at least a couple of hours, if not more, researching different keywords. While you are researching your keywords, check your competitors by doing a search in a couple of popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc., using those keywords. Keep a record of your competitors’ urls and other information because you don’t want to waste your time doing the same search again in the near future.

2. Use the keywords you selected into the meta tags of your home page. Meta tags are located in the head section of a web page. Go to one of your competitor’s website and select View and then Source from your web browser’s menu to view the html source of the web page. You will see the meta elements.

The two important meta tags are keywords and description meta tags. Don’t leave them blank. You can list your keywords, separated by comma, in the keywords meta tag. Construct a catchy description using your keywords for the description meta tag.

3. Use the keywords in your title tag. The text you use in the title tag appears in the title bar of the web browser. The title tag should be less than 64 characters long. Again, the key is to use a meaningful title using the keywords. Don’t just make a laundry list of your keywords for the title tag.

The title tag and your meta description may end up in many search engine listings. So, spend sometime to make these two elements interesting, meaningful, and relevant to your site.

4. Use the keywords in top heading (h1) tags of your page. Use one keyword (or a key phrase) for each h1 tag. Use these h1 tags for the headings of your contents.

5. In the home page content, use bold, using the strong html element, to highlight some of your keywords.

6. Italicize some of the keywords in your page.

7. Use the keywords in alt tags of images. You should always use the alt tag for all images.

8. Encourage others to use the keywords for text anchors when they link back to your site. Better yet, publish your own short link text with keyword anchors, bold and italicized key phrases and give it away for link exchanges.

9. If possible, use the keywords in your domain name. Try different arrangements of the keywords to come up with an available domain name that you can register.

10. If you are using php or asp or any other web programming language for your dynamic website, make your url search engine friendly using url rewrite techniques. Search the phrase url rewrite in Google to know more about url rewrite.

Keep in mind these simple rules every time you want to launch a website. Spending a few days upfront in the preparation of your site will pay off in the long run with better search engine rankings.

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