Build Recurring Income

Whether you value your Alexa traffic ranking or not there are definite advantages to having a high AlexRank. Many webmasters and business folk look at the AlexaRank as a reasonable representation of a site’s traffic. If you are selling advertising from your site the more “proof” you can demonstrate of your traffic – and in AlexaRank’s case it is an independent valuation of your traffic, which adds credibility – the more likely advertisers will come knocking at your door willing to give you some of their ad budget.

An AlexaRank Experiment

AlexaRank is calculated using the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa takes the browsing data from the millions of people using the Toolbar and calculates the traffic ranking of each site. As Alexa states, while low traffic sites are harder to gauge accurately, once a site reaches a 100,000 or less ranking the accuracy of the measure increases. Hence if you can top a 10,000 AlexaRank, or even 1000, the credibility of that ranking is increased.

As Blaine Moore pointed out in a comment made to my previous AlexaRank article, it is easy to – as he put it – “game” the AlexaRank if you have a tool that checks AlexaRank installed on your computer, and that doesn’t have to be just the toolbar, it can be for a FireFox extension like SearchStatus, which I recently installed on my browser. These tools send data to Alexa, and when Alexa receives any data about your surfing habits it will raise the traffic rankings for the sites you provide data for – and if you visit your own sites often you can raise your ranking.

I can’t verify that installing any AlexaRank checking tool will help your own site’s AlexaRank and to be honest after I installed SearchStatus I did not notice any significant change in my AlexaRank at my blogs. It wasn’t until I conducted a different experiment that I noticed more verifiable proof of a technique to increase your site’s AlexaRank.

How I Increased My AlexaRank By More Than 25%

Here’s how my logic went – I figured the toolbar and other AlexaRank checking tools tell Alexa my browsing habits, which is fine, but I’m only one person visiting my blogs (albeit I do it many times each day). What I really want is a way to tell Alexa about every person who visits my blogs, not just me. In order to do this, the Alexa reporting tool needs to be on my blog and downloaded by every person who visits my site each time they visit.

The obvious answer was to install an Alexa Site Widget on each of my blogs. The widget works like this:

If you click it you will be taken to my current Alexa traffic ranking data. You can also find the live widget in the sidebar of all my blogs. After installing this widget on to my blogs, within the next few days my rankings increased at least 25%. Prior to this gain my AlexaRank increases had been slow and steady, but never as significant as this in a short period of time, unless of course I earned a traffic spike from some other site(s) linking to me.

This makes complete sense, as my thinking above explains. If every visitor to your blog downloads the Alexa site widget when they visit your site, then Alexa has data on every visitor you have, at least every web reader, I don’t think RSS readers count since they never download the widget unless they go to your site. You might call this “gaming” your AlexaRank, but in this case I don’t think that’s an apt description – installing the site widget in fact helps to give Alexa enough data to provide your true AlexaRank, as opposed to what it thinks it should be based on the data it has from it’s toolbar users.

If you sell advertising from your blog or website then you should care about your AlexaRank. If that is the case then installing the Alexa site widget is a must. It takes only a few seconds and could significantly improve your current AlexaRank.
If any other bloggers or webmasters out there notice an increase in their AlexaRank after following my instructions and installing a site widget I’d love to hear about it. While I’m confident my results are good enough proof, it doesn’t hurt to have more examples to back up the hypothesis. Please leave a comment and tell me how your AlexaRank improves.

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Deliberate creation is the act of deciding what you want, and getting it. While that might sound very simple and easy, and you might be thinking you already do it, thereís actually a little bit more to it than you think. Rather than us just choosing a goal to go after and going after it, deliberate creation requires a certain focus to succeed.

Many of us think we want something and decide that weíre going to have it, whether itís some type of person or professional success, money, a specific job, a partner or something else. But in the end, we donít get that thing no matter how hard we try. And often weíre left confused as to why it didnít work out as we had planned.

Deliberate creation works with the idea that we truly have to believe in something before it can happen. The person who decides he wants a new car thatís a little out of his price range, for instance, may really want the car. He may be passionate about wanting the car. But most of the times he thinks of the car he also thinks about how heís going to have a hard time affording the car.

Deliberate creation attempts to remove that negative thinking. When you want something but you believe that achieving it is going to be difficult, it becomes difficult. Likewise, if you want something but secretly or not-so-secretly believe that getting it is impossible, then it will be impossible.

When creating deliberately, the person takes complete charge of his or her reality and spends time acting on things rather than reacting to them. Thereís a large focus on action vs. reaction. Where itís typically to get up in the morning with several goals or several tasks in mind that relate to a larger goal, those who practice acting rather than reacting will get up and focus on what they want instead of just reacting to things that happen or need to be done.

When you use this method of going about your day, the main principle is to surround yourself with what inspires you and makes you passionate about life. Itís important to first figure out what it is that you truly want. Itís believed that most people donít even know what it is that they want, deep down.

Once you figure out what youíre most passionate about, then deliberate, also sometimes called conscious, creation removes the obstacles in your way. Much of this happens within yourself, regarding the way you think about things. You learn to believe that things are possible.

Then you learn to focus. Focus is a key term because itís the focus that fans of the method claim make everything good possible. First, whatever your passion really is, whatever it is that you really want, must be believed to be possible. Then, you must focus on it and not lose that focus. The combination of belief and keeping what you want most in focus make up the deliberate creation that will allow you to achieve your dream.

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Why Directories Are Important

Directories should play a major role in your SEO efforts, well, at least the big and important ones, for the following reasons:

• Listings within major directories provide “context” to search engines. For example, if your web site is listed in the Open Directory Project under the category Pets -> Weird Pets -> Blue Cats, search engines will assume your web site has something to do with blue cats. Your web site and pages will be indexed faster and might have a better ranking in search results for specific terms (in this case, “blue cats”).

• Major directories (such as Yahoo! Directory, ODP, Jayde etc.) have high page ranks and as long as you obtain a non-reciprocal listing from them, paid or unpaid, your page rank will benefit greatly.

• Major directories are often replicated by other web sites (think of ODP, with hundreds of copies) which means that a listing somewhere in such a major directory will cause listings in all replica sites, contributing towards your link popularity efforts and boosting page ranks.

• The ODP (Open Directory Project) feeds results to Google, AOL, AltaVista, Lycos, Netscape – once again, a presence in ODP can get you quite far.

Submitting to Directories

As with most good things in life, you need to make efforts to get into quality directories. Although detailed instructions on how to submit your web sites are always provided by the directories, there are certain aspects to consider before you start hunting for directories and submit your web sites:

• Start with Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project: being listed in the two of them is worth more than being listed in all other directories together! You will find soon enough that, unfortunately, being listed in these two is the hardest thing to do: Yahoo requires a 9 annual fee for regular web sites (only non-commercial sites qualify for a free listing) and 0 for adult sites, while ODP is free but you need A LOT of luck to make your way into it. ODP is so large yet is strictly human edited, which means the waiting time for a listing can extend to even years! Make your duty as a SEO worker and submit your web site, but don’t get your hopes too high, unfortunately.

• Religiously follow the submission guidelines provided by directories: read them as many times as you need to make sure you will not upset its editors by submitting your site the wrong way, with inaccuracies, the wrong description style, or to the wrong category.

• Try to find niche directories if your web site’s content is suitable for that. For example, if your web site covers Marketing topics, focus your efforts into finding a Marketing-only directory (such as MarketingWHO.com) and submit your site there: search engines love links from sites relevant to yours!

• You will probably come across many directories with paid inclusions: use your common sense to appreciate if it’s worth it or not. A good criteria is to check their Google Page Rank: if it’s at least 3 levels higher than your site’s Page Rank, it’s probably worth spending the money for the inclusion fee. However, do look for directories with a flat, one-time fee rather than recurring monthly or annual fees: you’ll end up spending less money!

In the end, remember a simple rule: if it’s too easy to get into a directory, it’s probably not worth the effort to get into it in the first case.

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: One Week Marketing. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: One Week Rarketing review. Visit his website, One Week Marketing, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

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SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that many webmasters are now obsessing over. Many web site owners are spending countless hours tweaking and modifying their web sites, adding keyword rich content, and spending hours obtaining back links, so that their site will rank higher in search engines. It is true that over 90% of all web surfers use search engines to visit sites on a regular basis, but:

Should web masters and web site designers build and tweak sites for search engines, or for their visitors?

The answer to this question is that when you build a web site, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers, you are targeting people and human visitors. Hence, you should build a web site for humans, not search engines. The whole purpose to create a web site is so that you can get traffic. Without traffic, a web site is worthless. No matter how many features and how functional your site is, without traffic, your design and functionality do not matter. Although search engines can help bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines, are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your web site gets will be worthless. Visitors will visit and then soon leave your web site and not return again. Return visitors are critical for the success of any web site.

One good example of optimizing for search engines purely is some webmasters tend to stuff tons of keywords into the Meta-Tags; this is a very bad practice and will get the site blacklisted. Moreover, this black hat technique does not benefit the users.

Hence, when building a web site, one should build it for human visitors. If you have articles that are too keyword dense, the quality of the writing will not be as high as it should, and quite frankly, many of your visitors will be annoyed if you keep using words such as “mesothelioma” or “home insurance loan” to get your web site high in the search rankings for these terms. They will leave your web site and most likely not return.

If you create a web site where content is created for people to read and is well written, chances are you will get many return visitors who like the quality of the content you provide and come back frequently to read any new content you may have added. The more people that visit and link to your web site, the more popular it well become and naturally, it will be ranked higher in search engines.

Also, rather than spending hours building links for SEO purposes, that time could be better spent on adding features to your web site which would prompt more people to return to your site and stay at your web site for a longer period of time.

In conclusion, although spending lot of time on SEO and increasing your search engine rankings in the short run, the visitors you get from your SEO efforts will not be valuable as chances are they will not visit again. If you build your web sites for people, your traffic will grow and search engine rankings will rise naturally. Hence, the best way to build a successful web site is to build for people and allow your web site to naturally move up search engine rankings.

Stephen Creed is the author of this article and he proudly own a website called: One Week Marketing. His website blogs contains advanced strategies on internet marketing are available for all to learn here: One Week Marketing review. Visit his website, One Week Marketing, so that you don’t missed out great learning in the internet marketing world.

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One thing new email marketers don’t think about is that sending emails which have the potential of being spam, even if they’re not, will ruin your email marketing campaigns. Internet service providers, as well as big email platforms, are on a constant watch for email spam and will do anything in order to stop it. After all, spam takes up server resources and bandwidth and creates unhappy customers. Because of this, email platforms and Internet service providers will literally block messages sent by someone they deem to be a spammer.

If you want your customers to receive your newsletter, make sure that you follow these tips to ensure that your emails aren’t mistaken for spam.

Consistently Use Opt-In

If you aren’t familiar with the terms “opt-in” vs. “opt-out,” “opt-in” email marketing is takes place when you ask people to sign-up for your newsletter, and then customers make the decision whether to say “yes” or “no.” “Opt-out” email marketing is where you capture people’s email addresses and then automatically include them in your email list.

Now, which type of email marketing would you guess leads to great results?

If you guessed “opt-in,” you’re correct! People who willingly subscribe to your newsletter already understand its value and will be more responsive readers. Check out this Vertical Response review for software which can help you run a great opt-in campaign.

Have you even been forced into an email newsletter subscription? If so, then you know how annoying it is to receive emails that you don’t read, and didn’t even ask for. If you do this to your customers, they will come to view your brand as annoying, and certainly won’t be responsive to your newsletter. In this case, although your list may be bigger, your ROI will be very low as you pay to send emails to people who don’t even want to get them. Plus, when people get an email they don’t like or think is spammy, they will alert their email provider and you will be blacklisted in no time. Long story short: always utilize “opt-in” email marketing.

Submit Relevant Newsletter Updates

Almost as bad as “opt-out” email marketing is promising your readers one thing, and then giving them another. If you tell your subscribers that your newsletter will have the latest industry news or special discounts, and all you deliver is your company’s latest news, your customers will be annoyed and will unsubscribe. You need to ensure that what you claim is in your newsletter actually is there. Moreover, make sure that the first few emails you send are exactly what is promised by utilizing an auto-responder series for new readers. For great auto-responder software, check out these email marketing reviews. After you have proven your newsletter, you can begin to include promotional materials. If you have indeed delivered on your promise, your customers will be happy to convert when you send along the occasional promotion.

Make Sure That It’s Quick To Unsubscribe

Here’s an email marketing truth: all readers will eventually unsubscribe. Make it easy on your customers and be sure to include an “un-subscribe” link in your emails, preferable in the footer. Many email marketing companies, in order to ensure quality, will actually require that you do this in order to maintain compliance with spam laws and best practices. Even if your subscriber has enjoyed your email newsletter, if there is no easy way to remove themselves from your list, they will simply hit the “spam” button, alerting their email provider that your messages could possibly be spam. Now, obviously your emails are not, but sometimes it’s just easier to hit the “spam” button then to go through the trouble of manually unsubscribing on your website.

Follow these three rules, and you will be way ahead of most email marketers. If you do the above, then you will notice an increase in email deliverability and much happier customers. Remember: happy customers lead to more sales.

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What are you doing right now? You’re looking at the Internet! You and millions of other individuals are using the World Wide Web for information, entertainment, and communication.

Ever since the introduction of the Web in 1991, it has grown at a phenomenal pace, both in terms of number of users and money invested. And where there’s eyeballs and money, there’s advertising. Advertising on the Internet is a major revenue stream for most of your favorite websites, and this article will trace how it evolved from early efforts to modern multimedia marvels.

The early days of Internet access were dominated by service providers. Subscription services like AOL and Prodigy worked as a gateway to the larger World Wide Web, charging users a fee for access. Slowly, those providers began to leverage their traffic to feature sponsors as well. Unfortunately, because the modems of the era were painfully slow (even the 56KBPS modem wasn’t common back then), ads were pretty ineffective and even simple graphics took forever to load. But the advent of faster modems improved the potential of advertising on the Internet, with more data being pushed to home computers than ever before.

In the late 1990s came the dot-com boom. All of a sudden, Internet access became ubiquitous. Everybody and their mother was hopping online, and services like WebTV made it easy to surf the information superhighway. That period was the dawning of the online super-retailers like Amazon.com, who demonstrated that you could turn a profit by eliminating the infrastructure of a brick and mortar store and running a virtual storefront instead.

Content was also booming in this period, with groundbreaking Web magazines like Word.com and Slate.com producing cutting-edge content that pushed the envelope of what the Internet was capable of. Advertising on the Internet boomed with the introduction of the animated GIF image – now banners and spot ads could move and grab eyeballs from elsewhere on the page.

And after the boom, of course, came the bust. The revenue models for most of these sites was about as flimsy as toilet paper, and when confidence on Wall Street dropped, the vast majority of them went under. The lucky ones sold their equity to other investors and got out with a wad of cash, but more were left holding the bag. After a period of hibernation after September 11th, advertising on the Internet came back with a vengeance as rich media applications brought television-like experience to the computer, and sites like Hulu and YouTube are riding the wave.

What’s next for Web advertising? It’s not for me to predict, but with technology and avarice both speeding forward at a full clip, I’m sure we’ll see for ourselves soon enough.

NEW online marketing and Search Engine Optimization automation software Senuke.

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There are a lot of people who have recently discovered personal mastery as a method that could improve their way of life and deepen their perspective and outlook.

What is personal mastery and how can it improve your life?

Personal mastery is about deepening our understanding and expanding our perspective about life. Personal mastery develops vision, energies and enables us to determine what direction we are taking in our life. People who have achieved personal mastery testified that they would feel a positive change in their life.

There are different benefits an individual may gain from personal mastery:

• Clear decision making – since an individual who has attained personal mastery has gained clear vision on their purpose and their mission in life, decision making would be easy and at the same clear for them.

• Strong creative leadership – personal mastery develops strong leadership. Personal mastery can develop personal communication skills and confidence as a leader. Effective leaders also need to manage their emotions and not let their emotions get in the way of making  judgments.

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Following on from our last post, we found another great site which offers all the Auto Insurance Tips you could ever wish for, so let’s get saving some of that omonthly or yearly outlay and put it to better use.

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Auto Insurance Tips

If you are keen to set some immense goals for yourself, then you should also be aware of the top four things you should avoid. These things will not only deter you from reaching your goals and personal growth, but will discourage you and cause you to stop trying altogether.

1. Procrastination – Procrastination is the number one time thief of all time. It will steal your time and joy if you let it. It is really effortless to allow yourself to procrastinate and not even realize it. Various examples of procrastination include:

• Delaying a job until a later time or date
• Reading email instead of cleaning off your desk
• Cleaning out your vehicle instead of visiting a sick relative

2. Not being responsible – Responsibility is a key factor of goal setting. If you don’t have someone to be accountable to, chances are you won’t hold yourself accountable either. That means you’ll do less and may slack instead of working harder to attain your goals.

3. Wasting time – Wasting time is just about as bad as procrastinating. In fact, it may well be worse. Wasting time and procrastination go hand-in-hand and will kill your goals every single time. Examples of wasting time are:

• Talking on the phone too long
• Playing games on the computer
• Unnecessary shopping trips

4. Unrealistic expectations – It is one thing to have high expectations, and another to expect something that isn’t possible. When you set your goals, be sure to frequently ask yourself, “Is it realistically possible for me to do this thing in this amount of time?” If your reaction is yes, then you’re okay. If not, you should take a closer look at your goal and rethink some personal growth solutions.

How To Set Your Goals In 3 Easy Steps

Many people make goal setting a awkward thing to accomplish. The truth is that goal setting is simple and painless and anyone can do it. Here are three very simple steps that will get you started on the right foot for setting your goals.

1. Decide what you would like

Dream and dream big. There is no wish too big or too little. There is an old adage that goes something like this: “Reach for the moon and fall among the stars.” Not at all settle for “just anything.”

The main key to deciding what you desire is to determine what you are lacking. What is the one thing you wish you could do or have right now that you don’t? If you could only achieve one thing in your lifetime, what would that single thing be?

2. Make your action map

Dreaming big is just one very small part of the picture. You have to know how to get where you want to go.

Once you have a goal in place, it’s time to sit down and set some solid, realistic steps. These steps will carry you closer and closer to your final goal. An action map is not an option—it’s essential to reaching your goal.

3. Do it

All the dreaming and setting up in the world will get you nowhere unless you move yourself into action. Create a plan, and then follow through by getting up every day and doing something that will take you one additional step closer to your goal.

Can you attain your goal? Of course! First dream big, next create a plan, then finally, start working towards reaching your dream.

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Ok, we get it - how can you ever start your own business or become your own boss with all those bills? It’s no wonder so many of us find it nigh on impossible.
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