The link exchange requests you receive often have a bad effect on you as they are badly crafted and all look too similar. As a result it’s often hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.

So what can you do if you want to develop your own link campaign? How should you go about it?

If you want to get quality back links from authority sites, you will have to send link exchange requests that inspire and help the webmaster so that your request stands out. The secret of successful requests is to write link exchange messages that are not seen as spam by its reader.

Get the reader’s attention

If you want people to read your link exchange messages, they should not sound like the dozens of other emails that the typical webmaster receives each and every day. Try to use the recipient’s real name throughout your message. If your link request starts with “Dear webmaster” then it’s likely that it will be moved quickly to the trash bin.

Be personal

Write a personal message for each recipient. Use a real email address with a real name as the sender address. Free email addresses and email addresses with numbers look like spam and will not be dealt with by the webmaster.

Create interest

What’s in it for me? You should answer that primary question as soon as possible in your email. Do not list any features. Focus on benefits. First, nobody is really interested in the great features of your website. Tell the recipient how your website solves his problems or the problems of his readers.

Appeal to the ego of the recipient

Tell the recipient that you will list his site in some special category or that you have already linked to his site. It’s easier to convince people if you appeal to their ego.

Create desire

The recipient of your link exchange email will not react to your request if you don’t create desire.

To create desire out of interest, you can tell the recipient that you downloaded his eBook, subscribed to his newsletter or RSS feed, etc.

The webmaster you send an email to is far more likely to reciprocate if you have already done something in advance. Give the recipient the feeling that he’s special.

Make the action needed as easy as possible

Don’t make the webmaster think too much. Make the linking process as easy as possible by giving him copy/paste HTML code with your link information. Of course, the code should only be an option and you should not insist on that code. If the webmaster wants to use another code to link to your site, that’s okay.

A sample link request

Hi Name of webmaster,

I am the webmaster of xxxxxx.

I have been searching for good online website partners through Google, for mutual website promotions and traffic development.

In the process I came across your website http://www.xxxxxxxxx and after browsing through it I found it very informative and useful for the visitors to xxxxx. I therefore believe it would be beneficial for our companies if we swapped links. This exchange will go towards improving our sites ranks in the major search engines, especially Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Please consider adding my link to your site on a suitable page, preferably: http://xxxxxxxxxxxxlinks.html.

In response to this, I will add your website to our own links page http:/xxxxxxxxx/links.html

Here’s the information you need to upload our link:

Title: xxxxxxxx

Description: xxxxxxxxx

URL: http://xxxxxxxxxxxx

Please let me have your reciprocal link so I can add it to my links page – http://xxxxxxxxxxx/links.html.

If you have a unique article, you can send it to me with a back link to your own website and I will create a separate page for you in my article directory. Please make sure that the article is not a copy from any other website. I will also be happy to add a guest blog post to my xxxxxxxx Blog.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards, Your name

Your address and telephone numbers.

P.S. If you are not the webmaster please forward this email to the appropriate person.

I have now been using Web CEO for nearly 6 months and loved the free trial so much that I decided some 5 months ago to go ahead and purchase a copy of this great program which yesterday was upgraded to version 9.

The 12 tools found in Web SEO can help anyone to promote, maintain and analyze their website.

To show you what I like about Web SEO lets take a look at the extensive list of tasks it can accomplish to get your site on the way towards a top search engine listing with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing:

1. FIND YOUR PARTICULAR NICHE

Find Keywords – Get suggestions for new keywords relevant to your business and research your own keywords. Find out what people are actually looking for and how many times per day.

Optimize Pages – Tune your Web pages so that they always appear in the search results across all the most popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing.

Edit Pages – Get optimization advice and tweak your web pages in an easy to use editing environment. You can even edit your pages in both visual and code views. This gives you access to the most important tags like Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords without reading HTML. Change any link, ALT, width/height attribute on the page with just one click.

2. PROMOTE YOUR WEBSITE

Submit URL’s – Tell the world about your Web site. Instantly submit all your pages to all the major search engines.

Find link partners – Build and maintain link partnerships and keep track of all your site’s links.

Manage PPC Campaigns – Easily manage all your paid search campaigns.

3. ANALYZE YOUR SITE

Web site ranking checker – Know your exact positions in every popular search engine in the world without effort. See your site climb the rankings as you use WEB SEO.

Analyse Link Popularity – WEB SEO can produce a detailed report showing how many sites around the world link to your website.

Get traffic reports – Get comprehensive real-time visitor reports. Know for sure – who your visitors are, where they come from, which search engines and search phrases they used to find you. Track their paths. Find out which pages they like and which don’t.

4.MAINTAIN YOUR SITE

Upload files over FTP – Upload any file or folder to your host in an easy way without getting through sophisticated FTP routines. Or download anything, e.g. log-files from your Web site as if you were copying a file in Windows.

Control Site Quality – Get an excellent overview of site quality and usability. Check for broken links and slow pages and easily fix them.

Monitor site uptime – Make sure your website is up and running and sign up for the free Weekly Monitoring Report. This helps you keep an eye on your website performance throughout the week and understand whether it’s functioning properly.

And there’s even a journal entry system that keeps track of all the modules you use while working with Web SEO. This then produces a detailed report of the time you spend on your project. Need to make a note for the project you are working on? That’s covered too by just the click of a button. You can even use a scheduler to run various modules and reports automatically.

Web CEO is available as a free trial, so there’s no reason not to give it a try if you have a website that you need to promote and propel to new heights!

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The other day I downloaded a free trial copy of Web CEO.

It’s a really good software package of twelve tools that promote, maintain and analyze your website. And it’s a free trial, so there’s no reason not to give it a try if you have a website that you need to promote.

Some of the key features of this free trial version of Web SEO include:

• You can promote as many websites as you need to.
• You get Free SEO training with every copy of Web SEO.
• You benefit from free and fast technical support.

This great free trial software can help you to tweak your web pages to get free traffic from search engines, it can also monitor your rankings, submit your site and analyze your links (very important for high rankings in search engines – see our SEO article – Getting Inbound Links ). Also, you can find and fix errors on your site like broken links and missing images and can learn almost anything about visitors to your site using a great real-time traffic analyzer. The traffic analyzer is very good for ad campaign and Return on Investment (ROI) tracking.

All in all, this software was a lucky find! Be sure to check it out for yourself by downloading this free trial software from Web CEO.

When it comes to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising there are only two ways to decrease your spending. You can lower your cost per click (which will lower your position and your click through rate (CTR)) or you can improve your PPC advertisements (which will increase your CTR and your position).

Great ads will attract more clicks for a given amount of impressions, which will be rewarded by Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing with lower bid prices or higher rankings.

The real secret to writing the most popular PPC advertisement on the page is to ruthlessly test and track multiple ads – which is called split testing. By doing this, you will improve your advertising skill over time, and will eventually have a great performing ad with a very high click through rate (see our article Pay Per Click Marketing).

To get a high click through rate your ad must be designed in such a way that it attracts the eye of potential customers so here a a few tips on how to design the perfect PPC advertisement.

Create an attention-grabbing headline

Nothing in your advertisement is more important than your headline. The problem with PPC ads is that you don’t get much space for it. For example, Google allows ad titles to be only 25 characters long.

Write ads for small groups of keywords

You should try to get your keywords to appear multiple times in your ads so that you can take full advantage of keyword grouping. You could even include the keyword in all four lines of the PPC ad for maximum effect. But make sure this does not detract from the advertising message you are trying to put across.

Write ads with your audience in mind

When you write an ad, ask yourself “what is my audience looking for when they search for this particular keyword?” If you can write an ad that ‘solves a problem’, people with that problem will be instantly drawn to your ad.

You do have much space when it comes to writing your ads description as Google limits the two description lines and display URL to 35 characters each, so every single word you use is important.

Give the ads some visual appeal

This takes some additional creativity and planning, but can really help your PPC ad to stand out. For example you could make each line progressively longer (or shorter) for a cascading effect or you could alternate lengths to create a visual “arrow” or “reverse arrow” shape within your ad.

Ask the audience a question

This is definitely a good strategy for certain markets. If you can work a question into your headline or description, test it out and see how it performs. If someone is searching for something, and then you confirm what they are searching for, they are far more likely to click on your ad.

Use specific numbers

Numbers create interest and specific numbers create curiosity. They won’t always perform better, but try to test the impact of including numbers in your advertisement. Always include whole numbers such as 31% rather than numbers including decimal points, like 31.13%. In other words, round up or down rather than using decimal points.

Emphasize the benefits of your offer

Your audience doesn’t care how many features your are offering or how great they are – all they want to know is “What’s in it for me?” If you can tell them, you will likely have a hugely successful ad.

Use words that evoke emotion

If you can get people to feel emotions when reading your ad, they will probably feel compelled to click it. The list of emotion words is very long, so here is a nice wikipaedia guide to emotion words.

Test multiple versions of your display URL

You can certainly experiment with capitalization (i.e. “DomainName.com” vs “domainname.com”). You should also experiment with “www”, sub domains and pages.

Including your keywords in your domain name can often increase your CTR. You can essentially do this one of two ways: “Key-Words.DomainName.com” or “DomainName.com/Key-Words.”

Be cautious with prices

Although prices do have their place as negative qualifiers, they will usually be detrimental to your CTR. Unless your price is definitely the lowest on the block, it’s probably best to leave it out of your PPC ad.

Include a call-to-action

Sometimes, the most effective way to get someone to do something is to simply ask them to do it. That’s the principle behind the call to action. Because you have such limited space in a PPC ad, the call-to-action might not be beneficial, but it is at least worth a test. Just including something like “Click here to receive this benefit” or “Get your free copy now” is more than sufficient to test this idea.

Don’t waste space with useless words

The space available to you in a PPC ad is extremely limited. Although your ads should be grammatically correct, they do not need to be sophisticated sentences. Keep them simple and concise so that it is easier for the reader to quickly understand what you are offering.

Use negative keywords

Negative keywords permit advertisers to specify when ads should not be shown, such as when a keyword has multiple meanings or is part of other popular queries. You will be able to do this from within your PPC interface.

Although negative keywords are not directly related to how you write your ads, they are important. If you don’t use negative keywords, your ad is going to be triggered by keywords that you did not plan for. When this happens, your ad will not match what the consumer was searching for and will result in lower CTR and a lower placement.

To find out more about negative keywords see this Google page – How can I find the right negative keywords to benefit my campaign?

Make the ad relevant to your landing page

Although your landing page does not affect the CTR of your ad it can affect what you receive from it, in terms of a product sale or in sign ups for your service. It is therefore very important that you make your ad relevant to your landing page.

If a visitor reads a particular offer or benefit in your ad, they are expecting to find it when they click through to your landing page. Give them what you promise in your advertisement and you will experience a higher conversion rate.

So there you have it. Just a few tips on how to write killer PPC Ads.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that is free to use and is available to everyone. But there is a certain degree of etiquette involved in any type of social networking, so here are a few suggestions about how to promote your business by using Twitter.

Set up an Account with Twitter

The first thing to do is create your twitter account and then populate it with interesting tweets, which is Twitters way of describing a micro-blogging post containing no more than 140 characters.

Before you get to involved with this new account and all the tweets you intend to do, take some time to choose or design a customised Twitter background for your business page. Far too often individuals and even businesses go for the common default ones provided by Twitter. Here’s a really good blog post that’s all about twitter backgrounds and why you should keep away from the default ones – mashable.com/2009/05/23/twitter-backgrounds

Once you start to deal with your tweets, retweets and a growing list of followers, its best to use a free tool like Tweetdeck to help you with your Twitter marketing campaign. Tweetdeck is a desktop application that allows you to review and post updates to your Twitter Account. You can even use this tool to update your Twitter and Facebook pages at the same time!

Tweetdeck lets you sort the people and businesses you follow into groups and allows you to limit the number of tweets you view at any one time. It also lets you remove all the tweets you have seen with just one click.

Adding Interesting and Informative Tweets

By adding tweets that are interesting and relevant about your products and services, you can keep your tweets current and therefore popular with Twitter users. You should also add relevant news about your ‘industry’ to keep your Tweets interesting and varied.

To build up a following you should begin following people and businesses who are also using Twitter. As you follow others, most of them will follow you back. This is an important step as a blank Twitter account will not attract anyone.

You can use Twitter to point people to content on your website perhaps to articles you have written or the products or services you want to sell.

Bear in mind that Google indexes Twitter so your Twitter business page can appear in the organic search results.

So how can you follow others?

The best way to follow others is to do some research.

Go to Twitter.com and run a search by using keywords that are related to the industry you are targeting. For example if you are trying to sell an application for Apples IPhone you would search using the keywords such as Iphone, Iphone App and Iphone Apps and anything else that might find people who use Twitter and own an IPhone.

If your tweets are interesting to your readers you will find that other people will begin to follow you as they stumble across your Twitter business page.

Another way to pick up followers after you have logged-in is to click the Find People option at the top of the page and then enter keywords, related industry’s, locations or other details to locate potential followers and begin following them.

Always respond when your followers tweet you. If you do not keep up with you hard earned following it may begin to crumble. If you have a large following to maintain outsource you retweets or assign the task to one of your employees. Also make use of twitter tools like Tweetdeck to help with your twitter marketing campaign.

As you develop your Twitter marketing campaign you need to keep your followers engaged so you will have to tweet often, preferably daily or weekly.

Ensure that you retweet relevant tweets from other Twitter followers. If they then start to follow you will begin to benefit from all their followers. Retweeting is certainly one of the fastest ways to build your own Twitter followers.

By checking search.twitter.com frequently you can look for your brand name to see what customers are saying about your company. You can follow these tweets whether they are good or bad and get involved in the conversations. Your customers will be thrilled when you thank them for their kind words or even rectify a problem for them.

The ability of your customers who use Twitter to contact your management team is an invaluable resource. This one to one exchange permits you to keep close tabs on customer viewpoints, concerns and interests and is a great way to tap into social networking to test new ideas and to ask for customer feedback.

Avoid Spamming your followers

Beware – if you start to spam your followers they will quickly un-follow you. Spam activity includes things like only tweeting about your own products or services or retweeting the same URL time and time again. To many frivolous tweets can also be classed as spam.

It’s best to avoid these sort of tweets if you want to continue to build up and retain your Twitter followers.

Marketing and branding your Facebook Business Page can take time. You can’t just set up a Businesss Page and hope that people find you. If there is nothing on your page that interests people, no one will become a fan.

Try posting open-ended questions to entice responses from your fans such as what is your favourite widget? What do you like about this widget or how did you find our widget?

Posting links and photos are also a great way to get people interested, plus they are more visually appealing so people are more likely to pay attention.

Posting links that point to your website has the benefit of pushing people to your site to find out more about you and your Company. Try posting on your Business Wall page every time you update your blog.

You have to be a little proactive about getting fans, especially when your Business Page is new.

A couple of good ideas is to add your Facebook URL to your email signature and use the free badges and widgets that Facebook provides and add them to your website. And don’t forget to mention your business page in your blog posts and your twitter tweets. If you have a newsletter mention your Facebook Business Pages to your subscribers.

The more people in your network who find out about your page, the more friends you can make, and the larger your network becomes.

Once you have some supporters of your Page, you want to encourage more dialogue and interaction between yourself and them and even among each other. The biggest impact comes from simply having conversations with people.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook Advertising is a worth exploring. This allows you to place small display type ads in the right sidebar of Facebook pages and profiles. Currently it’s not as effective in pure responses as a well targeted Google AdWords campaigns. But it’s not really the same kind of vehicle and in any case you won’t find Google AdWords in Facebook at the moment.

Advertising space is a bit limited in these Facebook ads so use it wisely. Your headline (25 characters) should grab attention immediately with a strong benefit. There’s another 135 characters, in the body of the ad, you can use to attract your potential followers. You also have the option to upload an image. Take this option. It may be the most important aspect of your ad as Facebook users are very image driven (it’s the largest photo sharing site in the world) and the visual graphic you choose will make or break an ad.

To find out more about advertising with Facebokk see this page – http://www.facebook.com/advertising.

Customising Facebook

There are many more things you can add to your Facebook Business Pages such as customisable app’s, connecting the main page to your Twitter feed and blog. There are many other app’s and widgets to choose from.

The introduction of Facebook Applications is probably one of the most popular moves ever made by Facebook. They released their API so that developers and business owners could collaborate to create fun and cool applications that engage users. The applications created so far widely vary in purpose – some are fun games, some are useful, some are directly related and tied into businesses and some are just plain utilities, but still useful.

Many popular applications have hundreds of thousands of monthly active users and that information speaks for itself. If you want to read more about creating your own applications for Facebook, you should check out the Facebook Developers page.

Once you have an application created, be sure to add it to your profile and to your Facebook group and page.

Boxes and the FBML App

A new default tab called Boxes holds lots of potential for businesses as well. Think of a box page as a free form scratch pad. You can add up to 10 of what Facebook calls FBML elements (you must add the Facebook Static FBML application to your app’s to edit these). FBML is Facebook’s mark-up language but these elements will take any HTML as well. So you have the ability to add newsletter sign-up forms, ebook downloads, and other HTML based elements. (You can add any of the default elements such as video or discussions as well.) Once you create the elements you can slide them around the page to the get them to display as you like, but you must go to the wall page and hit Edit the page to edit an individual FBML element that’s already installed.

You can even create custom landing pages inside of your Facebook Page and promote them as entry points.

One source of frustration at the moment is that many app’s don’t work with the latest update. Facebook’s included app’s, such as video, events, photos and discussion, all good ones for your Page, seem to work, but many other 3rd party app’s do not.

Facebook Widgets

In addition to all the app’s you can also make use of Facebook Widgets that can help spread the word about your new Facebook Business Page. You can check these out at http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets. Once you have something like this on your website and blog, visitors can just click on it and they will land on your Facebook Business Page where they can become a fan.

Finally If you don’t have a Facebook Business Page yet, head over to http://www.facebook.com and get started. You won’t regret it!

Here’s an example of a simple widget:

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Affiliate marketing is obviously not the easiest thing to do because many people seem have a go at it, but soon give up due to the lack of any real success. So what can you do to improve your chances of becoming an affiliate marketing super star?

Here are a few vital tips to point you in the right direction. But bear in mind that it takes dedication and persistence to be successful in affiliate marketing. Your first attempt may even fail! But keep on trying and success will eventually come calling.

Here are the key headings from our latest article on Affiliate Marketing.

• Buy a few good affiliate marketing books
• See top affiliate website’s for even more ideas
• Types of affiliate program
• Initially, choose a topic you know well and love
• There is no best merchant program out there
• Keyword research
• Buy a domain name
• Build your website
• Write compelling website copy
• Choose ads that fit with your website’s purpose
• Be Prepared to Work for Your Affiliates
• Try Different Affiliate Programs
• Advertise using Pay Per Click – Google AdWords
• Banners – are they a good idea to use?
• Article Marketing
• YouTube
• Make good use of Google Analytics
• Work Hard to get the site making money
• Beware – crooks can steel your affiliate commission

To find out what affilliate marketing is all about see our complete article – The Very Best Affiliate Marketing Tips.

The traditional link building process comes in three primary flavours: direct links to your website (inbound links), cross linking content on the Internet (reciprocal and 3 way links), and deep linking to specific pages within your website.

This linking to specific pages of your website can be greatly enhanced by link baiting. So what does link baiting include from the SEO viewpoint?

Link Baiting means to create something that naturally attracts inbound links for your website. Just one successful link baiting campaign can be worth far more than any amount of PPC advertising you undertake. It can also be far more effective than the thousands of emails you could send out trying to get inbound links for your website.

Just getting your link bait featured on Digg will yield tens of thousands of visitors in a very short period of time and potentially many more inbound links within just a few weeks.

The clear goal of link baiting is to naturally increase the number of links pointing to your website. And the more links you have pointing back to your site the more popular your website is considered to be by all the major search engines, and so the higher your search engine ranking will turn out to be.

Some Common Link Baiting Techniques

• Become an expert in your particular niche and write valuable and newsworthy information.
• Write an interesting and informative article about your products or services.
• Write useful comments on something that is currently happening in your field of activity.
• Interview (by e-mail or phone) prominent people and publish the results to your site and/or blog.
• Write something outrageous or controversial to spark an interest.
• Run an event, such as a contest or free giveaway.
• Make a blog theme, plug in or a piece of software to give away as an incentive.
• Make or design something that others can put on their website’s but that links back to your own site.
• Write something funny or controversial.
• Be the first to expose a scam or the scammer.
• Be the first to research and document something completely new and interesting.
• Provide people with a way to feel important about themselves, someone they care about, or something they feel should be important, and watch people flock to your site.
• Take recent news and events and push them out to others who form part of your online community.

By getting people to talk about your link bait, blog about it, discuss it on forums and post it on their social networks and link to it from their website’s, you can attract tons of visitors to your own site.

Get your site appearing on Google, Yahoo and MSN!

A good and proven Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company can certainly help you achieve this, but what’s involved in optimising a web site?

Our latest web design guide will help you to optimise your own site and provide a great check list if you want to employ an SEO company.

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