Click here to read part one of our series on SEO…

Once your site is search engine optimized, you can expect to get more traffic to your site from the search engines. People who may be interested in your site will find it easier if your website is search engine optimized. Most people use the search engines to find what they are looking for when they go online. By having your website optimized and easy to find in the search engine results pages, you can attract more traffic to your website through the search engines.

There are many internet marketing companies that will help you get your website search engine optimized and keep it that way. Some of the methods that they use to optimize a website include the following:

Ÿ Article marketing
Ÿ Blogs
Ÿ Press Releases
Ÿ Video ads
Ÿ Google ads

All of these can be optimized in order to incorporate keywords that will make the website appear in the search engine results pages or, in the case of Google ads, land them on pages where they are most likely to find people who will be interested in your website. The entire purpose of making a website search engine optimized is to make it easier for potential clients or customers to visit your site.

Those who may be interested in your products or services can only take advantage of them if the know about them and where to get them. You have, most likely, gone online in search of something that you wanted to buy at one time or another. Chances are that you put the information into the search engine toolbar to pull up search engine results pages (SERPs). You probably sifted through a few pages before you came up with what you wanted.

This is the basic concept of SEO. Those who understand how to use search engine optimization effectively to make their website more searchable are more likely to come up in the first two pages of the search engine results pages and are more likely to have clients visit their site.

There are probably many sites out there that offer you interesting information as well as products or services. Unfortunately, many of them are buried deep in the search engine results pages. Most people, when searching online for something, will give up after going a few pages into the search engine results pages. In some cases, a search may produce millions of hits. Needless to say, you do not want to go through every one in order to find what you are looking for. Most people have neither the time or the inclination to do this.

This is why it is so important for businesses and others who want to have their website noticed make sure that they use SEO techniques in order to do so. By using SEO, a website will no longer be buried in the middle or at the end of millions of results. It has a better chance of getting to the front of the search engine results pages.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is used in all aspects of web marketing. You need to understand as much as you can about how SEO works in order to get the proper marketing of your website online.

When you use SEO in all of your content – both text and visual, you can draw more traffic to your site. In order to understand how to use SEO, you need to know why people use this type of marketing and rely on it so heavily in order to get the desired traffic to their website. SEO is what gets a website noticed in the search engines.

So what exactly is SEO? This sets up your text, photos and videos so that they are easy to find when someone is searching for them using the various search engines online. While it is often said that Google relies more on SEO content than Yahoo, which relies more on link building, the truth of the matter is that in order for a website to be discovered online, it must come up in the search engine.

For example, if you have a website dedicated to a coaching business, you will want to make sure that you structure your site so that others who may be looking for the services and products you sell will be able to find it online. Those who are looking online for what you have to sell may do it in a number of different ways, although the easiest way for someone to find something online is to use the search engines. Most of the traffic to your website will come from search engine optimization.

You need to know which keywords will work for your website. These are the words or phrases that people will put into the search engine bars to receive the search engine results pages. Many people today are putting in longer phrases into the search engines to narrow down their search.

There are tools that the website owner can use to investigate the best keywords for their website, based on what they sell and what words potential customers are likely to plug into the search bars that will lead them to the site. In order to succeed at this, a website owner must not only know the concept of SEO, but also much about the target market, which is those who are most likely to purchase the products on the website.

If you are just starting out your website, or if you have a website up and running already, you need to know how to use search engine optimization in all facets of your marketing. While there are other ways to market your website and products without using SEO, the fact of the matter is that 60 percent of all traffic on websites comes from those who found the website in the search engines. These people are seeking out what you have to offer and are finding you online as long as you are accessible.

Click here to read part two of our series on SEO…

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that if you do any part of your business on the internet (even if it’s just a simple website or blog), then you’re at risk of an attack from hackers. While we tend to read about the large corporate hacking targets most often in the news and think of hacking only in terms of big companies, in truth every business with an online component is a target.

Even if your website doesn’t collect any personal information from your customers, or have any financial assets that could be stolen, it might still have value to hackers. For example, a hacker that compromises your website could gain access to your web server and use that server to send spam, store illegal files or engage in other illicit online activities.

Stay Current on Security Updates

Hopefully you’re already in the habit of staying current on all the security updates for whatever web platform your website is based upon. For example, WordPress users who stay up to date on all of the underlying security updates are generally quite safe.

But the current trend in web business and web commerce (a trend that is continuing to accelerate) is using custom functionalities and custom applications along with the standard web platform. For WordPress users, one common type of custom web application is a “plug-in” that’s used to provide a new function on the website. These plug-ins can take many different forms, and are currently being used by many websites.

WordPress Plug-In Safety

Many WordPress websites use plug-ins that are available either on WordPress’ own plug-in directory, or through the plug-in author’s own website. One advantage of sticking with plug-ins that are available through the WordPress plug-in directory is that you’ll be able to read feedback from other users who have already tried the plug-in.

For this reason, you might want to avoid using any new plug-ins until there is enough feedback for you to feel comfortable that any security risks are minimal. Positive feedback is certainly no guarantee of a secure plug-in, but that feedback should be helpful to your decision-making process.

If your custom application is truly custom (in the sense that you retain a programmer to build the application to your specifications), then the best way to protect your business is to be confident that the programmer or company that’s making the application for you is highly qualified and has created other secure applications in the past.

Test and Verify

In addition, if your business is large then you may have the budget available to hire a computer security consulting firm to review and verify the security of the code that makes up your custom applications. If you’re unable to hire a security firm to test the security of your custom applications, then you can gain some level of comfort by using the various open source tools that are available, including those at w3af.sourceforge.net and www.websecurify.com.

Because your web presence is so valuable, it’s ultimately up to you to be confident that whatever custom applications you include on your website don’t compromise your overall site security.

The term “guerrilla marketing” was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in 1984, the same year he released a book with the same title. The term refers to performing marketing and promotional activities on a low budget. The unconventional tactics are designed to provide maximum impact while using the most minimal of resources.

Guerilla marketing can take many forms. You can apply these tactics to promote your business both online and offline. This type of marketing can take the form of things you are already doing and are familiar with, as well as things you may never have thought of or are too uncomfortable to try.

With guerilla marketing, you will want to think outside the box and try new things (that don’t cost a lot of money). For instance, you can print flyers and start hanging them all over town.

Another cost-effective strategy is to create something of value and to give it away in order to attract more customers. Have you ever walked into a restaurant or store that had a box or fishbowl sitting by the register, and people could drop in a piece of paper with their name and phone number in hopes of winning a prize?

Try doing this online by approaching websites that offer a complimentary product or service to yours and asking if you can team up with them on a contest. Offer to give away one of your products or services to a lucky winner from their mailing list. The owners of the complimentary website will email their mailing list about your contest and provide a link to a page on your website that includes a form where people can enter your contest. In exchange, you can offer to give them some type of promotion on your website or through a mailing to your list.

Another topic featured in guerilla marketing is public speaking. This is something that many people do not care for. However, if you can get over that fear you can gain a lot of publicity this way. You can do this online by holding free seminars on whichever topics you have branded yourself as an expert in.

Doing this is very easy. You can search online for companies that offer free access to telephone conference lines or web conference rooms. Once you have the date, place, and time of your seminar set, you will want to start promoting it.

You can start the publicity process by emailing your list, putting a banner up on your website, and including a link to your seminar landing page in all of your signature lines. The trick is to promote the fact that you are giving the seminar. You can freely give out the information of the date and time. However, make people sign up for your list before you give out the phone number to dial into or the link to the conference room.

By using some of the guerilla marketing tactics, you will be able to grow your business without spending too much money.

Everyone has times when they lack motivation. On the other hand, you may be so motivated and full of ideas that you lose your focus because you are trying to juggle too many tasks at once. However, multi-tasking may do more harm than good. When your mind is divided by too many tasks, your productivity decreases. Here are some tips to help you stay focused and motivated on your business.

Choose a Niche.

Once you know what your niche market is, you will be able to focus on tasks that will help you with that particular market. Try to narrow your market as much as possible. For instance, if you have a coaching business and want to help people work from home, perhaps you can target a certain field, such as web designers or virtual assistants. You will gain a reputation for being an expert in that field and will be able to help people create specific plans while coaching them to success.

Set Goals, and Write Them Down.

When you set goals for your business, you are defining the direction in which you want to take your business. When you write them down, you are greatly increasing the odds that you will accomplish the goals you have set.

Create a Business Plan.

When someone wants to start a brick and mortar business, they need to create a business plan and submit it to a bank to secure a loan. A business plan is a summary of how a business will be organized and a listing of activities that the owner needs to complete. For instance, a business plan will explain when a business owner expects to make a profit, as well as the type of marketing they intend to do. Creating a business plan for your home business will increase your chances of success.

Stay Away From Distractions.

It is easy to lose track of time when reading email, blogs, and surfing the web. Set aside a block of time in the morning and evening to take care of email. Try to limit your internet during work hours for tasks specific to work, such as research. Wait until you are done with your work to read the celebrity gossip.

Prioritize Your Tasks.

When you write out your to-do list, prioritizing your tasks will keep you working on what is important. Some items may need to be accomplished as soon as possible, while other things can wait a day or two. Take a colored highlighter and highlight the things that need to be done ASAP. When you look at your to-do list, your eyes will be drawn to the items that need the most attention.

Outsource When Possible.

As you look over your to-do list, do you notice items that can be handled by someone else? By delegating tasks to others, you will have more free time to work on things that require your attention.

What would you do if you lost everything in your Gmail account? It’s happened to some people – some Gmail users recently suffered a data loss. Gmail was able to get everything back for them eventually. However, it woke many people up to the possibility of losing everything in their account.

If you use Gmail, chances are your life is stored in those archived messages. So how do you protect it?

A Variety of Choices

There are actually many services you can use to back up your Gmail. Backupify is a paid service that backs up Gmail, Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, Twitter, and many additional web applications. It’s a “set it and forget it” type of backup security system. Another option is to use TrueSwitch and back up your Gmail into a Hotmail account. Gmail Backup is another free option for backups. If you prefer to have all of your backup data in your possession, rather than stored on an outside server, then consider Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is Mozilla’s free email application. If you use Firefox as your browser then you may be familiar with the application. The steps to backup with Thunderbird are easy.

Step #1 Download Thunderbird

Simply visit the Mozilla Thunderbird download page and click to download. Save the set-up exe file on your computer. Once it is saved, open the file and click “Run” to install.

Step #2 Change Your Gmail Settings

In the meantime, log into your Gmail and change the settings to enable POP for all mail, and set Gmail to keep its copy.

Step #3 Finish Installation

Follow the procedures to finish the installation and set-up for Thunderbird. You can import your Outlook or Outlook Express settings if you use that software.

Step #4 Back In Gmail

On that same settings page “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” in Gmail, you’ll see a link at the bottom of the page. It says, “Configure your email client (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, iPhone) Configuration instructions.” Go ahead and click the link. Follow the instructions for Thunderbird and you’ll be good to go. Your information will now be backed up on Thunderbird and you’ll have a second tier of protection.

If you like to have a third tier of protection, consider backing up everything to an online service. This way, if you’re ever hacked and they gain access to everything, you haven’t lost anything.

There are almost 800 million members on Facebook today. With this vast web of interconnectivity, Facebook is fast becoming the leading way for ideas and content to spread on the internet. If you want to go viral, Facebook is one of the main platforms to pay attention to.

Two powerful tools to master on Facebook are Facebook pages and Facebook apps. Both of these are integrated in Facebook’s ecosystem and have access a wide array of tools.

Here’s how to use Facebook’s pages and apps to go viral.

An Idea with a Call to Action

Your idea for a page or for an app needs to have a call to action built into it.

Many of the protests in the Arab Uprising, from Egypt to Libya, were organized on Facebook and/or Twitter. Newly created pages literally got tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of followers in as little as a week or two.

They grew so quickly because there was a call to action. Share the page and let the world know what was going on. Even people in non-Arabic countries got involved, because of this strong call to action.

For a more light-hearted example, take a look at FarmVille, one of the most successful Facebook games in history. One of the reasons it was so successful was because there was a constant call to action. People were always being asked to share the game with their friends.

Your idea needs to not only be great, but have a call to action for sharing built into it.

Reporting

Facebook has one very unique reporting feature: it tells you about the viral aspect of your posts and of your app, as a statistic.

The statistic measures how often people share your content. If you primarily have three different kinds of content, say polls, videos and text, you could measure each post individually and see which one(s) people tend to share.

If you find that people share videos released on your page four times more often than text released on your page, you’ll know exactly where to focus.

While it’s possible to derive this statistic on other media platforms, generally they don’t give it to you in this clear-cut form. Facebook makes tracking and optimizing for virality easy.

Making It Go Viral

Going viral on Facebook is all about having a great core idea, then testing and testing until you reach the maximum viral velocity you can reach.

It means testing different messages, different kinds of outreach and different call to actions. If you find it extremely hard to get traction, it’s likely that your idea just isn’t striking a cord. On the other hand, if your idea is spreading, then your job is to accelerate the pace and make the idea go truly viral.

Some people are natural-born writers. They hold a pen up to paper and words start flowing. On the other hand, there are people who struggle to write a few paragraphs. Having a unique writing style will help set your writing apart from others, even if you fall into the group of people that finds writing difficult. Here are some ways to develop your writing style.

The best writers have a love of words, and they are avid readers. Believe it or not, reading is a great way to develop your writing style. The types of things you enjoy reading are probably things you would enjoy writing.

Reading other peoples’ writing will also give you insights on your own writing. As you read, some authors’ styles will seem to pop out at you as very good or very bad. You probably have a writing style similar to the authors you enjoy reading.

What are your writing strengths? Some people are great at writing news-oriented stories, while some people prefer to write reviews and opinion pieces. If you like to teach people things, your writing strength could be how-to articles. If you enjoy coming up with slogans and catchy headlines, you might be a natural when it comes to copywriting. There are many types of writing to explore.

In order to develop your writing style, you need to write. Try to write something everyday. The more you write, the easier it will get. Experiment with different styles and techniques. You will see that some types of writing come easier to you. Blogs and journals are a great way to get writing practice.

These “practice writings” don’t need to be masterpieces, and you can delete what you write if you want. The point is to keep your writing muscles flexed by exercising them a little each day. Your natural strengths will come out as you try different forms of writing.

Embrace your personality and voice as you write. Use words that you would use when you speak. If your writing sounds unnatural and awkward, your reader will be turned off. Let your personality come out in your writing. Have a conversation with your readers as you would with someone you were speaking to face to face. If you like talking about certain subjects, write about them.

Free writing can also help you develop your unique style. Sit down in a quiet place and set a timer for five to ten minutes. Clear your head and start writing what comes to your mind, and keep writing until time runs out. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling. Just write whatever you think of.

When the timer goes off, read over what you have written. It may not make sense, but it can give you ideas for other things to write about.

Credibility is the crux of any marketing message. Without credibility, the best content in the world will simply get passed over. On the other hand, an uninspiring speech by a highly credible person will be met with rapt attention and motivation.

For example, if an Olympic athlete was giving advice about how to lose weight, people would probably listen – even if the advice itself was hard to follow. On the other hand, if a homeless person gave great advice, chances are nobody would listen.

What’s the difference? Credibility. The athlete has credibility, while the homeless person doesn’t. Credibility gets people to listen to you. Credibility helps create emotions. Credibility helps create motivation.

Build Credibility In …

There are three things you need to build credibility.

First, you need to build credibility in yourself, the person speaking, presenting or writing. The more credibility can can build in yourself, the more you earn people’s attention.

Second, you need credibility in your company. Is your company a reputable firm? How long have you been in business? Do you have a recognizable logo? Do you have professional design?

Finally, you need to build credibility in your product. Even if you have a great brand and people trust you, that doesn’t necessarily mean they trust your product. When Coca Cola rolled out New Coke, it became quickly apparent that although they had a very strong brand, people simply didn’t want a product change. New Coke had zero credibility and quickly had to be phased out.

How to Build Credibility

There are many different ways you can build credibility in your product. Here are some of the most prevalent ones.

A demonstration – One of the most powerful ways to build credibility is to show people your product in action.

For example, the “Will It Blend” videos were essentially highly entertaining videos demonstrating the Blendtec blender. Blending the iPhone, marbles, lighters and other materials made the videos go viral quickly, which launched a multi-million dollar brand.

Photo proof – If you’re promoting a wealth product, take a picture with you and your Ferrari. If you’re promoting a health product, use before and after photos.

Use photos to show the results of your product. Photos are more real than similar claims with just words.

Testimonials – Don’t say it yourself. Instead, let other people say it for you. That’s much more effective, as others don’t have an incentive to promote your products. The more testimonials the better, especially if they are from authoritative sources.

Word of Mouth – If a friend hears about you or your product through a friend, that carries massive credibility. How do you generate word of mouth? By consistently putting out high quality products and content.

Before you run with any new marketing message, be sure to have a rock solid foundation of credibility in all three areas.

There are many wonderful benefits to working from home including caring for your family and being there when they need you. You’re the boss, so working from a home office often means you can choose your hours. Sick days aren’t an issue and neither is buying a work wardrobe. The list of perks could go on and on.

However, there are a few downsides to working from home. One of the most common and surprising to many work at home folks is the isolation. It can be lonely working by yourself during the day. Even if you have children at home, the lack of adult communication can wear on you.

Here are a few ideas and tips to help you beat the work from home loneliness.

Join an Offline Networking Group

While online networking is fine, it really doesn’t help you feel connected to other individuals. It doesn’t help you stop feeling isolated and lonely. Offline networking, however, can. Join a local group of work at home individuals. There are groups dedicated to work at home people and there are groups dedicated to specific industries.

For example, if you’re a freelance writer, chances are there’s a writer’s group in your area. If you don’t have a local group to join, start one. There are undoubtedly other work at home professionals in your community who would like to connect.

Take a Class

Working from home doesn’t mean you have to stay home 24/7. Get out of the house in the evenings or on the weekends and take a class. It can be a class to help further your business or career. Or it can be a class just for fun. If you have always wanted to learn to knit or kick box, sign up for a class.

Exercise

Exercise helps boost your mental and physical wellbeing. It can help reduce feelings of depression and exercise improves sleep and increases your metabolism and energy levels too. The key to creating an exercise habit is to first find an activity that you enjoy. If you’re feeling isolated at home, consider finding a group class like Zumba or kick boxing. If you enjoy running, consider joining a local running club.

Taking steps to alleviate your feelings of loneliness is only the beginning. To keep those feelings at bay it’s important to create a habit of socializing. It’s easy to fall into a stay at home rut. Find activities that you enjoy, that fuel your mind and body, and schedule them into your life. You’ll be glad you did.