Thursday, December 15, 2005

Is Santa Claus Real?

In January, 2005 we ran a poll to see how many believed
in Santa Claus and 80% of the votes were "Yes" they did believe.

I was reminded of this poll earlier this week while reading

a newspaper column where they quoted a newspaper editor,

Frank Church. Mr. Church had stated, "Yes, Virginia, there

is a Santa Claus... The most real things in the world are those

which neither children nor men can see."


The column also gave a very good definition of Santa Claus

and I quote, "Santa Claus is more than a human being. Santa

Claus is the living symbol of selfless giving, handed down

from one generation to the next." (Kansas City Star,

December 13, 2005)


So what has believing in Santa Claus got to do with internet

marketing.


Giving.


Like Santa Claus, the selfless giver to all, a good internet

marketer must be willing to give:

  • Some of their time and money to make their business.

  • Quality products and services.

  • Good support to their customers, readers, members, downline, etc.

  • Honesty.

  • Trustworthiness.

  • More Value than what they ask for in return.

And 4 of these things; Quality, Honesty, Trustworthiness

and Value are things neither "children or men" can see.


To be a good internet marketer you don't have to believe

in Santa Claus. You don't have to believe he visits everyone's

house for Christmas or that he leaves presents.


To be a good internet marketer you don't have to believe in

Santa Claus but you do need to have his "selfless giving"

within you.


Is there a Santa Claus?


Yes, he's alive and well in all successful internet marketers.

To Your Success,

Susan

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Christmas Give-A-Ways and Our Sale

Happy Hollidays,

The giveaways have started and you can get some
quality products just for signing up to try some ezines.

Here are 3 you'll want to check out:

  1. 30 Days of Christmas
  2. Affiliate Marketers Roadmap
  3. EZasMagic Cheers

Also, the 2nd annual T'was The Night Before Christmas Sale
has started at FriendsWhoCare. There are 20 products being
sold for 50% or more off of their normal price. And this year
we are offering a bonus to qualified buyers - a free lifetime
membership to BigResaleRights.com - valued at $97.00.

So while you're getting presents for everyone else on your
list this year, be sure to check out the giveaways and the
sale so you can get yourself something that will help you
with your business.

To Your Success,
Susan

Thursday, December 08, 2005

10 Facts About Search Engines

As you well know, getting a good listing on the search engines can really help get some good, quality traffic to your site.

But how do you get a good listing? That's the million dollar question.

Rather than explain how search engines select the top sites or how to trick them into listing your site in the top 10, let's learn some of the facts about search engines.

Now in case you're wondering why I don't just give you the 'magic' formula or algorithm for getting a good search engine placement I'll give you:

Fact Number 1: Search engines change their formula frequently in an attempt to keep quality sites at the top of the listing. They do this because of all the attempts to 'trick' or 'fool' them and, to stay popular with their users, they need to list the most relevant sites first.

Fact Number 2: Every search engine has it's own formula for determining the sites and the ordering of the sites it will list. And even though they all use many of the same factors in their formulas, there is no 1 formula that will work for all of them.

As for giving you some of the tricks that others have tried to use to get good search engine placement, I'll just say that the tricks that have worked in the past like using misleading meta tag keywords and embedding hidden keywords don't work today and the new tricks like creating lots of 'spam' sites using automatic search engine page creators won't be working much longer.

Fact Number 3: Search engine owners know the tricks being used and develop ways to filter them out.

Now that you know that there is no 1 'magic' formula and using a 'trick' won't work for long, you should also know:

Fact Number 4: Search engines do 'black list' sites they consider 'spam' and block them from being listed.

Because of all the articles and products about Google, you may think that Google has become the search engine of choice. And while Google is gaining in popularity,

Fact Number 5: Google still hasn't captured Yahoo's number 1 position.

Even though Google isn't number 1,

Fact Number 6: Using 'good advice' on how to improve your Google position will also help you with your placement on Yahoo and many other search engines.

Some of 'good advice' for getting a good position is to have a site with good content and to use your keywords within your content. But the web has become so big that there are now thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of pages competing for the same keywords.

Because of this explosion in the number of pages available for generic keyword searches,

Fact Number 7: Search engine users are now adding more descriptive terms in their searches.

Another fact that most people don't realize about search engines is that:

Fact Number 8: Search engines don't rank or list web sites, they rank and list web pages. That means every page of your site has the potential to be listed if you set it up properly.

Since we're getting into the realm of less known search engine facts, let's talk about how

Fact Number 9: Search engines use their own traffic tracking information to help determine which sites to list. If they see that they have a top site that continually gets visited for a brief amount of time and the searchers usually come back and continue looking, the search engine may determine the site is of little value and either move it down on the list or remove it.

The last fact isn't really about search engines but has been included to help you measure your progress as you work to improve your search engine positions.

A couple of terms you've probably seen many times are "Google Page Rank (PR)" and "Alexa Traffic Ranking". While both measure different things,

Fact Number 10: Google PR and Alexa Traffic Ranking are 2 of the best indicators on how well your search engine optimization work is going. Improving your Google PR and your Alexa Traffic Ranking can help you get a better search engine position.

To Your Success,
Susan

Monday, December 05, 2005

A Warning About Fake PayPal Email

Those phisher are working hard during December.

This morning I received 2 emails to update my
information on PayPal and both were bogus.

One message said they needed me to update my
credit card info and the other said I needed
to update my personal info or my account would
be terminated. *Both* included a link to
click so I could update my information.

Please remember - PayPal *never* includes a
link in their email when they request you to update
or provide personal information. They
always tell you to go to their site and login.

Never, I repeat, Never click on a link that
looks like it came from PayPal asking you
for personal or credit information.

To Your Success,
Susan

PS - We've started our 2nd Annual
T'was The Night Before Christmas Sale
where you can get things to help you with
your online business. You owe it to yourself
to take a look.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

How To Add Links To Your Blog

Yesterday I received an email from Harry. Seems someone told him he should create a blog for his business and he had 3 very good questions:

  1. What do I need to know to create this Blog?
  2. How much does it cost?
  3. Do I need to have a hosting site?

Because the answers to these questions were contained in a tip I wrote last year I posted another old tip to our article archive and sent Harry the link.

And while all of Harry's questions were answered in that tip, there's a lot more to blogging than just creating the blog. (Remember last month when I wrote about getting traffic to your blog?)

Now if you have a blog you're using in place of a website or as a method to drive traffic to your website, you also need to know how to add links to your blog. I don't mean the links contained in your articles or signature but the links you want displayed in the right sidebar.

To show you what I mean please look at the following 2 blogs.

Example 1:


Example 2:




Notice how the blog in Example 1 contains only 1 link in the right sidebar and it's for "Google News." That's the link provided by the blogger template.

Now look at the links contained in the second example. There are links pointing to other sites and products but no "Google News."

There are 2 good reasons to put your website, affiliate and product links in the right sidebar:

  1. The link can help your Google page rank.
  2. Blog readers now have the opportunity to visit another site of your choice.

Because I use Blogger.com I am going to tell you how to change the links for their templates but changing the links for other blogging services like WordPress is allowed and should be very similar.

To put your links on your Blogger templage:

  1. Login to your blogger account and click "Change Settings."
  2. Click on the "Template" tab.
  3. Copy all the code that is displayed in the box holding the template code and save it in a text file. (This is your backup in case you mess up and need to start over so don't change anything in this file until you have everything you change working.)
  4. In the box that displays the code for the template, scroll down until you find the following code. There won't be colored code in what your searching so you'll have to scan the code to locate it.

    <h2 class="sidebar-title">Links</h2>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News></a</li>
    <li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me></a></li>
    <li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me></a></li>
    </ul>

  5. "This is the HTML code for the sidebar links. The purple code is the URL for the link. The green code is what the person sees when visiting your blog." (Taken from "The Complete Blog and Ping Turorial.")
  6. Each of the lines that starts with <li> and ends with </li> displays a different link. Change the purple code to the link you want your visitor to visit and change the green code to words you want your blog visitors to see. (You can also make the same changes to the line for Google News.)
  7. After you've made your changes, save your changes and republish your blog.
  8. View your blog to see your new links to make sure everything looks and works OK.

The Blogger template gives you 3 links however you may not need them all or you may want more.

If you don't need all 3 links you can remove the lines
<li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me></a></li>
that you're not going to change. Just be sure not to remove the </ul>
at the end.

If you need more links that the 3 provided, add more by inserting more
<li><a href="<<li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me></a></li>
lines before the </ul>.

Once your finished you will have added value to your blog for both your readers and yourself.

To Your Success,
Susan

PS Read the Blog and Ping Tutorial to discover how to set up a free blog on Blogger.com, how to design it for marketing and how to get it spidered by Google and Yahoo quickly. Available at: http://www.friendswhocare.us/blogs