Author Archive

Three-Letter Swedish Domain Sells for Six Figures to Top This Week’s Domain Sales Chart

Posted by admin on Nov 26 2009 | Domain Names

Here is how all of the leaders stack up for the week ending Sunday, Nov. 22:

The DN Journal Top 20 Reported Domain Sales - Mon. Nov. 16, 2009 - Sun. Nov. 22, 2009
Euro to Dollar Conversion (€ to $) is Based on Rates in Effect Nov. 24, 200

  1. MSB.se 950,000SEK = $141,550 Pvt Sale
  2. I.de €49,000 = $73,500 Sedo
  3. E.biz $66,001Sedo
  4. SearchEngineOptimization.net $62,500 AfternicDLS
  5. MultiVitamins.com $45,000 Moniker/T.R.A.F.F.I.C. NY
  6. Originals.com $37,500 Moniker/T.R.A.F.F.I.C. NY
  7. TP.de €20,000 = $30,000 Sedo
  8. Raspberry.com $27,500 Moniker/T.R.A.F.F.I.C. NY
  9. D.biz $26,110 Sedo
  10. Camera.net $26,001 Sedo
  11. GeneralContracting.com $25,000 Sedo
  12. F3.com $24,999 Sedo
  13. Hockey.org $22,500 Moniker/T.R.A.F.F.I.C. NY
  14. Mnet.net $22,000 AfternicDLS
  15. DesignerSunglasses.com $21,000 Moniker/T.R.A.F.F.I.C. NY
  16. InCommon.com $20,000 AfternicDLS
  17. XAI.com €12,650 = $18,975 Sedo
  18. P4.com $18,000 Sedo
  19. 24Bet.com €11,148 = $16,722 MissDomain
  20. tie Echantillons.com €10,000 = $15,000 Sedo
  21. tie Grounders.com $15,000 AfternicDLS
  22. tie MensDesignerClothing.com $15,000 MostWantedDomains

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Win The Battle Of Relevancy Online With Custom Content

Posted by admin on Jul 27 2009 | Site Promotion

It’s a dog eat dog world out there on the Internet. There is the capacity for an unlimited number of storefronts on the web that you’d never be able to find on main street. The fact is that there is even more competition for business online than there is in the brick-and-mortar world. This is only going to get more intense. It wasn’t so long ago that many people were afraid to use credit cards online. Shopping online was a curiosity. Now, it’s a given.

The battle of relevancy online is the battle of one site being more useful than another. In the growing virtual marketplace, it isn’t nearly enough to just have a number of products and hope for the best. Look at Amazon.com reviews—they are core to what has made that site grow. A glowing Amazon review can do a lot for a product’s sales. Web surfers use Amazon reviews as much as they use a review in the local paper, if not more. Reviews have made Amazon a relevant and trusted resource for a department store’s worth of products.

Not every site can hope to have the same review structure as Amazon. A number of affiliate sites use Amazon reviews as their own content. Web surfers are getting savvy to this: they can smell an affiliate site. Why not just go to Amazon directly? The battle for relevancy, then, is to become something as trusted and vital as the major sites online. You can’t necessarily wait around for people to write reviews, and the process may not even apply to your site, so a site owner needs to provide content of your own.

Another word for relevancy is usefulness. It has been shown that the longer a person sticks around on a site, the more likely he or she will make a purchase. Even if that person doesn’t make a purchase the first time to the site, the site will have left an impression. People are looking for information on a product or service as much as they are looking to make an immediate purchase. Web surfers like to be informed shoppers and the web gives them an unlimited amount of places to get this information.

This is where your site comes in. Don’t make a web surfer click off your site to find information on a product—give them the information right on site. This means you should have articles available about any and all issues affecting a particular type of product or service. There can be hundreds of potential topics on one type of product, and a site may have dozens upon dozens of products available.

Not only will this type of information keep your site relevant to web surfers, it will be relevant to search engines as well. With content, these make up your target audience: search engine spiders and real people. If you provide relevant content that speaks to both, your site can compete with the giants.

For more information visit: http://www.markethealth.com/?aid=456782

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Why Organic Real Estate On The Web Is So Important

Posted by admin on Jul 26 2009 | Make Money

When it comes to real estate, people usually shout out the mantra: location, location, location. When it comes to web real estate, you could say the same thing: location, location, location in search engines. Organic real estate on the web refers to the positioning your website has on the web landscape. A solid organic real estate design and SEO strategy will make a website as necessary a destination as the corner market. In short, organic real estate keeps a website from languishing unseen in cyberspace.

So how does Organic Real Estate work? What makes Organic Real estate, well, organic? The main feature of Organic Real Estate is quality, informative content. This is what sets quality SEO plans apart from those that are merely trying to trick search engine spiders. Content should be natural, not written as if composed by a machine. Natural, well-written web content will increase page rank at a faster rate than content that is written only with keywords in mind.

This is especially important for web entrepreneurs who run affiliate sites. Web surfers are getting savvy to the fact that many affiliate sites are just a dummy site set-up to “hopefully” bring in some sales. Experienced affiliate marketers know that you can make a site that is as competitive, and useful, as the affiliate’s host site. The more quality content there is on your site, the better an affiliate site can separate itself from the crowded web marketplace.

But Organic Real Estate is about a lot more than content—and this is where a lot of SEO plans fall short. In addition to providing content, a site owner must determine a target audience. In one way, content and target audience go hand in hand. You have to figure out target audience and tailor content accordingly. In addition, you may have a different target audience for different products or services offered on your site. Content and keyword targeting must be tailored to each potential type of client and customer.

Without these strategies, what will you have: a site that looks more like a link-factory than a trusted resource in a particular industry. In the past, people stressed the need for quality web design. While this is no doubt important, it is now much easier for amateur’s to design a high-quality looking site. It is far less easy for site owners to provide fresh and useful content. You’ll find a bevy of nice-looking sites with little or nothing to offer in terms of content. In Web 2.0, content is what separates the great from the mediocre, and the organic from the artificial.

For more information visit: http://www.markethealth.com/?aid=45678

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Why Custom Content Is So Critical

Posted by admin on Jul 25 2009 | Site Promotion

Think of the alternatives to custom content: no content at all or content that has been taken from another site. If those two options seem unusable, you’re getting a good idea of why custom content is so important. Looking at it another way: not having content is like designing a web site with the exact same layout as Amazon. This just isn’t done—your site needs to be unique to be effective.

The two keys to custom content are uniqueness and authority. An informed buyer is an active buyer. Don’t make a web surfer go elsewhere to find information on products and services. Everything a customer needs to know should be found on your site: informative articles, glossary definitions, reviews of products, answers to Frequently Asked Questions, and more. When all of this content is in place, a site will rank more highly in search engines, so a potential customer will have a better chance to come to the site and start perusing the information.

The idea is not just to sell specific products, but to sell the website itself, as well as sell the entire company. All of these things work in conjunction with each other. If people trust the information on the site, they’ll be more willing to make a purchase. In addition, there’s an element of gratitude for having direct questions answered. A site should never cover the bare minimum, but the gamut—every possible piece of information surrounding an industry, no matter how small.

Along with custom content there should be content organization. Just plastering long paragraphs of text on the screen will exhaust a web surfer before he or she even starts reading. Content needs to be well organized with relevant links both within the article and on the sidebar leading to information that corresponds to the original article. Just as the content needs to be well informed and well written, it needs to be well presented, or a web surfer is going to click out and move on.

All of these issues can make a website stand out from the vast array of sites online. People are more and more looking to the web for both information and shopping. At a content-rich site, surfers can kill two birds with one stone. These days, web owners are hiring copywriters to handle the task of preparing custom content. Each site will have a different demographic and require a different type of writing—for instance, technical or conversational—so it is important to find a content writing firm that specializes in a wide variety of industries.

For more information visit: http://www.markethealth.com/?aid=456782

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Why Affiliate Marketing Is So Important

Posted by admin on Jul 24 2009 | Affiliate Revenue

Much of the information you’ll find online is aimed at affiliate marketers: Make millions online! While many of these claims are overblown, they also get the attention of small and medium-sized businesses that also want to cash in on the affiliate marketing gold rush. Becoming an affiliate is as lucrative a proposition as becoming an affiliate marketer. For this reason, you’ll see new affiliate opportunities arising each and every day.

Look at what a business is getting if it starts an affiliate program: free advertising. That’s the simplest way to put it. The marketer signs up with the business and agrees to put a link on a website. The business only has to pay for this service if a sale is made—normally for a reasonable commission. As this is a sale that wouldn’t have been made without the affiliate marketer’s site, it is money well spent.

Even if a sale is not made, the link provides a method of advertising that can increase name recognition. Most business owners know that people might not make a purchase until the fifth time they see a brand name or come surfing to a site. An affiliate program can spread the word about a business on dozens upon dozens of sites. When combined with more traditional types of advertising, this can be a great way for a new business to get a foothold or an established business to expand its reach. These links can help search engine ranking as well.

The trick to a good affiliate partnership is finding quality marketers. While you obviously want to have your link on as many sites as possible, you also want those sites to be adept at generating traffic and sales. The fact remains that a large number of affiliate sites are posted and then never updated again. A business wants to find marketers who will design a professional-looking site and market that site effectively. At affiliate forums, businesses can hook up with marketers to start a relationship. A business owner can get a sense of the marketer’s skill and drive from his or her stable of sites.

There’s a lot of competition for marketers out there, especially established, quality marketers. Your best bet is to offer very attractive terms—a higher commission than the competition or a unique link layout. It should go without saying that your own site is well designed. An affiliate marketer wants to make a sale just as much as you do, and marketers won’t sign up with a site that is poorly constructed. Offer a good site and a good product and you’ll bring in more affiliate marketers. All this said, it is no surprise that affiliate marketing is growing at such an exponential rate. It is as important to business as any other type of marketing.

For more information visit: http://www.markethealth.com/?aid=456782

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What To Look For In An Affiliate Partner

Posted by admin on Jul 23 2009 | Affiliate Revenue

Affiliate websites are one of the fastest growing wings of e-commerce. You can literally find thousands of affiliate partnerships to choose from. This is both good and bad news. The good news is that there are great affiliate deals to be found online that haven’t yet been over-saturated by partnerships. The bad news is that there are affiliate partners out there that you shouldn’t touch with a virtual ten-foot pole.

There are a number of steps you should take before signing up with an affiliate partner. First, you should read the affiliates terms and conditions. Too often, budding marketers skip over an affiliates terms. An affiliate partner may not allow for Google Adwords or other marketing avenues so make sure this is not explicitly laid out in the affiliates terms and conditions. If there are no terms of service, this should be a warning in itself. A reputable affiliate will normally have terms of service.

Payment is obviously a huge one. Make sure the affiliate has reasonable terms. Some affiliates, such as Amazon, only pay out after a set number of sales—you do not make a dime on the first, second, or even tenth sale. Other affiliates will pay out for each sale. The flip side is that an affiliate with a sales minimum may also have a better percentage payout. The best-case scenario is to find an affiliate partner that pays out for every sale and offers a good percentage.

This will be all for naught if the affiliate does not pay out in a timely manner. Try and not learn from experience, in other words, don’t get burned. Instead, learn from other people’s experience. Go to affiliate marketing forums to see if a particular affiliate has a good or bad reputation. The trouble here is that a new affiliate might not have a marketer base yet, and these affiliates usually offer the most attractive terms in order to bring affiliates in. Use some common sense—if the affiliate’s site is well designed and they offer a good and useful product, you could try and test the waters.

On that front, it is sometimes a good idea to find an affiliate partner that is not overly saturated. If you offer a service that can’t be found on every other web page, it can lead to a better sales rate. However, once again there’s a flip side: if it’s a virtually unknown site, it’s harder to build up buyer’s trust, as compared to well-known affiliate programs like Amazon or the Discover card. A lot of the onus falls on you—if your site is well designed and well managed, buyers will trust your affiliate links.

For more information visit: http://www.markethealth.com/?aid=456782

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What Custom Content Can Do For You

Posted by admin on Jul 22 2009 | Site Promotion

In an increasingly crowded web marketplace, it can be difficult to separate from the pack. Sometimes even having a good page rank is not enough. You could have a number one ranking, but if your site is uninformative or poorly designed, web surfers are going to click and run. With the number of affiliate sites now entering the field, there is even more competition for web surfers’ time. To succeed on the web, your site needs to be an absolute authority in a particular field.

A website is the best promotional tool an e-business can have. The business can advertise all over the web and set up pay-per-click campaigns, but if the site itself is weak, you cannot expect web surfers to stick around or come back a second time. Custom content is all about keeping surfers on site and coming back for more.

The more content you have, the more chance there will be that a surfer will type in that keyphrase that matches content found in content. However, keep in mind that web surfers can smell fake content—content that is purely used to generate traffic, with awkwardly phrased keyphrases and grammatical oddities. Your better bet is to write content that is factually relevant: informative content, rather than just keyword-driven content. In relevant content, a large number of keyphrases will be covered, in addition to being a trusted source on the topic.

A hundred pages of informative content can be far superior to a hundred pages of keyword-driven content. If a spider detects that too many keyphrases are mashed together on a page, the site could be red-flagged, or even banished to a permanent low ranking in a search engine. In the past, a website owner could write the same keyword over and over again at the bottom of the page. Spiders got wise to this and now this tactic can be more of a detriment than a benefit. Relevant, custom content will never be red-flagged by search engine spiders.

Custom content can lead to sales or new clientele. Think of two sites: one site offers little to no information on a topic. Another site addresses any and all topics affecting an industry. Which site do you think a potential customer is going to trust? Content is not just about ranking high in search engines via page ranking, but about providing a quality website. Custom content should be a mixture of both naturally keyword-rich content as well as highly useful information.

For more information visit: http://www.markethealth.com/?aid=456782

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Importance and Benefits Of Link Popularity

Posted by admin on Jul 19 2009 | Search Engine Optimization

Importance And Benefits Of Link Popularity

Importance And Benefits Of Link Popularity

Everyone likes to be popular. In a way, the web is just like one big popularity contest. It wasn’t fair in high school, and it might not seem so fair now. You can have the best-designed, most informative site online, but if no one links to you, you’re going to have a harder time getting a high search engine ranking. Ranking high with search engines relies on two things: content and link popularity.

Of course, if you have the most informative site online, your job is half done. One of the keys to bringing in new links is having a well-designed site. If you go after link exchanges and your site looks like it belongs in the last decade, you’re going to be hard-pressed to find any takers. People don’t have all the room in the world to add links on their site. You need to provide a site that is worth linking to. On the flipside, you should find link partners with quality sites of their own.

Link popularity is not just about quantity, but quality. Certainly, it is a good idea to have a great number of links coming in, but search engine spiders also take into account the quality of those links: i.e. how many sites link to the site that links to you. Spiders hold a premium on sites that link to you without a corresponding reciprocal link. When search engine spiders surf your site, they’re looking for the type of content that you have on your site and the number of links going both in and out.

An easy way to start building link popularity is to add your site to a number of directories. These directories may or may not require a reciprocal link. The higher the quality of the directory, the more the directory listing will be worth. Really, you should spend a good amount of time adding your site to as many directories as possible. Look for other immediate avenues for link building as well—post in forums, on blogs, or create a blog of your own. All of these will be indexed by search engines, which will help increase your ranking.

One of the major advantages of having a blog is you have one more place to add a link to your site. In addition, you have one more place where you can trade links—contact other bloggers in a similar field and trade links. You should not only be looking to increase link popularity for the host site, but for blogs and other sub-sites as well.

It is absolutely imperative that your site is useful. The more content you provide, the more you can get a foothold in your industry. When you write new content, promote it: Digg.com the article and add the article to directories and other sources. Websites can then potentially place the article on their sites, linking to the site where the article originated. A link doesn’t necessarily have to be permanent—a temporary link to an article can help search engine ranking as well.

What this all means is that link popularity is an evolving process. You should always be corresponding with site owners looking for a link trade. And you should be frequently providing new content to ensure that your site is worth the link.

For more information visit: http://www.markethealth.com/?aid=456782

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How To Make Money With Affiliate Programs

Posted by admin on Jul 18 2009 | Affiliate Revenue

Affiliate programs can either be a way to put a little extra cash in your pocket or, hopefully, become a full time job. However, it’s not like you can put up a bunch of affiliate links and expect to start making a mint. If you want to make a full time job’s worth of money off affiliate marketing, you have to work at it full time. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that it works 24/7—but this doesn’t mean you should also put in several hours a day of your own time.

The affiliate marketers who have had the most outstanding success are normally those who have more than one site working at once. It’s much harder to make a decent amount of money if you have one affiliate site at a time. Experienced affiliate marketers will have a number of different sites running at once, all with different types of affiliate links. What this means is that each affiliate site will need separate SEO: new content in the form of blogs, forums, articles, and other techniques.

A key to a successful affiliate marketing program is to make the affiliate site a useful resource. Just posting a bunch of links is not going to impress many web surfers. They’ll leave and likely never come back. The trick to any web business is to keep people on site—this is true for the affiliate partner and it’s true for affiliate marketers. An affiliate site shouldn’t necessarily scream, “affiliate site.” Instead, it can be a trusted resource on a particular topic.

Useful content is the best way to make this possible. Take a site that has a number of links to sports-related businesses (apparel, equipment, tickets, books, etc.). The affiliate marketer can then set up a forum that talks about different sports teams, strategy, and so on—potentially, this forum could bring in sports fans from across the country. Blogging is another great medium for affiliate marketing. On the same site, the blogger could write reviews of new equipment or write in depth trade talk about a variety of sports. These are just a few ideas but they show how affiliate marketing can—and should—be a serious, long-term proposition.

What it comes down to is that affiliate marketing is no different than running the host site. Both are about running a business, even if an affiliate marketer has no direct product or service to sell. An affiliate marketer should set up a site that is useful and informative—a destination that people will come back to again and again. In some cases, an affiliate site might even be more informative than the partner’s website.

Only until these issues are covered can an affiliate marketer hope to make a good amount of money with affiliate marketing. Sure, you could put up links and hope for the best, but you should think about investing some time into the site if you really hope to turn a respectable profit.

For more information visit: http://www.markethealth.com/?aid=456782

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Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond (Paperback)

Posted by admin on Jul 17 2009 | Products Review

Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond

This is not another SEO book written for marketing professionals.  Between these covers you’ll find practical advice and examples for people who build websites aiming to reach their target audience. Each chapter will introduce you to best practices and fresh perspectives on how to accomplish these simple, yet indispensable goals:Help more people find your siteHelp users find content within your siteEncourage return visitsThe path this book travels through the villages of Web sta (more…)

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