Web Design & SEO For Small Businesses

Blogging can be a great tool to marketing your business online. It can boost your business functionalities and business strategies. Every day tons of new blogs are created by online entrepreneurs to get traffic and website visibility.

Here are the important points why your business needs a blog

Search engine visibility is an important element in website marketing. One of the important factors of having a blog is to get search engine ranking for your website, which in turn increase traffic, readership and interaction by your potential customers. Blog would be indexed by search engine very fast since it has fresh content been updated very often. Also the content are categorize with category and topics, which is easy to navigate for any user.

Interaction with your blog readers – Blogs allows visitors to comment on the blog posts about their views on your blog post. This way you can capture a positive lead or customers. You can interact with them via email to follow up with them. That’s why blogging can also be a lead generation tool.

Create unique and high quality content – The uniqueness about blog is anyway in your business can create a blog posts related to your business. Multiple author’s accounts can be created with different username and password. So all employees in your company can create blog posts.

Blog can be a great PR tool – Blogs can be used to post about company news, press release, Product launch etc. Blog also supports your other marketing efforts in a variety of ways. Journalists look up for company blogs to get updated information for their coverage. So blog is not just a marketing tool but also a Public relation tool as well.

Can Create Buzz marketing – A business blog since it is unique and informative it can develop a strong base of loyal readers. Blog can spread like wildfire if you can write blog posts which can create buzz in your industry thanks to the blogsphere. The word of mouth marketing can be easily targeted if you have a blog to your business.

The bottom-line is blogging is not just and informative online dairy but if it is utilized properly it can be a great marketing tool.

 

Recently, there where tons of blog posts over the internet about the Google Page Rank Update. The huge outcry about the Google’s PR update was from bloggers. Some of the top bloggers like Johnchow.com, problogger.net and copybloggers.com and many major website where all hit by this update. Page Rank popularity became popular in the last few years among Search Engine Optimization and Marketing professional because they understood a website Page Rank can bring their website higher on top of search engine ranking. These also create a multi-million dollar link selling industry. Since PR is closely connected to link popularity of a website a new industry started to involve which was known as Text link brokers. 
With this recent PR update we all have to learn a lesson that gaining PR through fictitious ways and means like selling and buying links can hurt your website natural growth. We all try to promote our website to gain maximum traffic for conversion and this should be our goal. PR will build naturally. For example my blog thomsonchemmanoor.com was started in May2007 to that old but I started building links naturally. It gains a PR of 3 right now. I don’t have any plans to selling or buy links for this site, I am sure with my effort by posting informative and valuable content on affiliate marketing, blogging, expired domain information, search engine optimization and contextual advertisement which is the theme of this blog will gain natural links and PR.

This should be the strategy for any blog or a website. By the way my title is about Google Page Rank is dead or still alive? The answer is PR is still very much alive if you do it in a natural way, PR shows authority of a webpage not just a green line on a toolbar. If you are trying to game the PR algorithm then for those it is dead. Right now the website which has lowered Page Rank their traffic from Google still remains the same.

Before you read this post you might have heard tons of blog posts about you can make money through blogs. And what you do is get out there immediately and start a blog on certain topic and put some Google Adsense on it and immediately start posting few blog posts and check your web stats that are you getting any traffic, add all kinds of tools to generate traffic and finally your interests dies down and that’s the death of that blog.  What I would recommend is to start a blog which is fun and interesting to its readers. The problem with all new bloggers is that they want to generate revenue immediately. There is not short-cut to generate money, as I always say that making money online is not that easy you need to spend time and money to make profits.  

Blog for fun and for your readers not for search engines bots or not for Google Adsense money it will follow slowly if you have a real love for your blog by posting interesting and value content. Always make your readers anxious and humors with each post, so they will subscribe for your RSS feeds and will come back. If you have interest in certain subject you can write better interesting blog posts and there would be followers too. Add personal and events happening in your area in your blog posts which make it touchier.   Blogging is all about giving and taking, first you need to give the blogsphere with quality content and you can take your fruits of your labor after some time as money.   

Most of the top bloggers today all start their blogs as a passion which later turned their passion into full time jobs and start generating revenue for their hard work. Every day month a million blogs are born but hardly .05 blogs survive and goes further to be a successful blog. Still they are more opportunity for new blogs so many niches are still left open for bloggers. Find a niche and start blogging for fun and value. Sure you blog would start earning money slow and steadily.

Today I am going just little bit away from my theme. Because after couple of months I just logged on to my Istockphoto website to download some images for one of my project. What I found was amazing I had submitted 50images to istockphoto in the last year with the Digital Canon SLR which my wife presented to me at my last years birthday, it has generated revenue of $600 till today. Wow a good residual income online. I also check other website which I had submitted my photographs like fotolia, dreamtime, bigstockphoto and shutterstock all these sites has generated some good amount of revenue ranging from 200-300 dollars. The total income from all the sites generated was around $2014.50. 

It has been a while I have taken stock photos to sell but still I take photos while I am traveling. Saying said that making money online is not just through blogging or affiliate marketing there are several ways to make money online. All you need is to come up with a strategy to create income online and be an expert in that field. Even if you are not an expert in certain field but if you have interested sure you will succeed because today there are several was you can educate yourself in certain subject either online or offline and be an expert to some extent.  

My interested to take photos started while I was very young and gradually It developed into a hobby. Here are some tips and techniques you can use if you think you want to make some money online by taking and selling stock photos.

1) A decent digital camera with a minimum of 5 Mega Pixel. Don’t Start with expensive cameras first. You can get a good digital camera for between 200-300 dollars. You can upgrade to more expensive ones later with the money you start making money from selling photos which you have taken from this camera.

2) Create a list of Stock photo sites they are several of them just pick the top ten. If you submit to other sites which has less traffic it take long time to sell one.

3) Browse through these top stock photo websites and see which ones are downloaded more. Try to get an idea from those images and takes pictures which sells more. Usually pictures of nature won’t get sell more. Istockphoto and some other stock image sites have list of themes which are in demand.

4) To start selling you need to apply as a photographer with these stock sites first for that you need to send them some of your best pictures taken so far. Some sites are very strict in picking the photographers so you should be careful and send one of the best images with good lighting and composition.

5) Don’t give up in the beginning stages you photos might be reject due to poor quality. So don’t worries try to improve your creativity and style of photography.

6) You need to add some SEO into stock photos as well. You need to give better keywords related to the images to show up when people browsing the photos. A stock photo with a large volume of related keywords would sell more than with fewer keywords. Also don’t try to use non-related keywords it might get you in trouble and may be even remove you images because of malpractices. 

The bottom line is take nice pictures with a creative eye which will sell and make you money online with stock photos.

Buying a Existing website is very lucrative if it is done correctly, since theses sites are already build and is bring traffic. You are benefiting from the efforts of others who have worked on this site. You can buy these existing websites from different websites, forums and auctions like eBay etc. An existing websites are sold from $10 to more than a million.

Buying an existing website has many advantages but it doesn’t mean it will guarantee you success. One of the top reasons to consider buying established websites is because of the traffic flow from various links and referrals, as you all know traffic is key for any online business. I have come up with strategies and things to look up for while buying established website, in the quest for buying existing websites if couldn’t find the right website would be a nightmare.So consider the following steps below before buying an existing website to make money online.

Traffic – all Internet entrepreneurs knows traffic is vital for any online business. The sole purpose of buying an established website is because of the traffic the website is generating. There are several ways to find traffic of an existing website. Before negotiating with the website owner you need to get website stats or raw log from the website host. Although there are several online tools out there to give you an idea of what kind of traffic and an approximate amount of visitors it is receiving every month, asking the owner for more details is important. You need to get at least 6 months old data to come to the conclusion weather the website is receiving consistence traffic. Also these data will give you more details about the website weather the traffic is coming from search engines, referral links or directories. Even if the established website is generating traffic you need to know from where it is coming from some of the website owners try to create fake traffic from link farms and other kinds of black hat techniques which will get the website banned from search engines. The Quality visitors which you need to look up are search engines traffic, traffic from authority sites and Directories. This traffic is genuine and targeted traffic, so if you buy this established website there would be potential of generating more money online.

Domain age – Domain age of the existing website is important to not only since it is established but also in the eyes of the search engines. An older domain has value because it has been online for a longer period of time. Usually it is hard to find older existing website for sale because it is costly as well as hardly anyone sells because of their effort they have put into it. But if you are lucky by chance and able to grab one check for the domain age you can do that using who is of their website. But some time the domain owner has the option to make who is information private. In this situation you can either ask the owner or check the website in way back machine tool to find. Usually this would help you to determine the age of the website domain name. An Idea old domain should be at least 3 years old.

Unique content – When you buy an existing website you need to get the ownership of the content as well. One of the reasons you are buying the website is because of this unique content. Always looks for quality and good content with lots of pages. If the website has quality content you will have the potential to grow, it will have loyal and regular visitors.Also before you buy you need to check weather the same website content is been duplicated elsewhere. You can do that by typing the content within “content” in the Google search box. If it is unique the search results will show only one site who is the original owner of the content. Also make sure the owner has the full ownership of the content otherwise in future you will be trouble.

Page Rank – Page Rank is very important for a website; it shows the authority of a website in which ever niche it is. A website builds up its page rank via links from other website. My advice is to go for a website which has a page rank higher than Five. A PR 5 website should have good quality links from other authority sites from the same niche. This gives you an advantage in future selling of your site or its growth. A website gains its page rank through quality links as well as if it is older domain the chances of getting higher page rank is high.

Link Popularity – Link popularity is important for any website to rank higher in search engine results. Google, Yahoo and MSN algorithms is build with link popularity the more quality links the website has the chances of ranking higher in Search Engine Result
Pages (SERPs). You can check the links of an existing website by typing this “link: www.domainname.com” command in the Google or any other search engine search box. Right now MSN has stop allowing showing the Link popularity command. There are also other tools which will show you the link popularity like www.marketleap.com or if you do a search in Google you can come up with different tools for link popularity.

Monetization opportunity – You need to check weather the existing website has the monetization opportunity. If the website is in a good niche and has good amount of traffic you can monetizes. There are several ways to monetize like advertisements, paid links, reviewing products and affiliate marketing. The whole purpose of buying an existing website is to make money online through website monetization.