Site Smart

Toby Somerville has published the second part of his three part series on getting contract work. I covered the first part in a previous post which laid the ground work for what Toby talks about next, the, ever so vital, initial email. Again I am going to summarize on the key points that Toby makes.

The Initial Written Contact
This first email is the “teaser” email. The “get your foot in the door” introduction. Nothing more. It is not your resume or an essay on your approach to the web. Its a “would you like to know more?” introduction.

Keep the Reader in Mind
When creating your email you need to think about the person reading the email. What they looking for and what they will be asking themselves:

• Who is emailing me and why?
• What skills do they have that we might find useful now or in the future?
• What relevant experience do they have?
• How good are they? Lets see some work examples.
• How much do they expect to be paid?
• How much do they expect to be paid?

The Email Format
I recommend a text-only email, rather than HTML. For the simple reason that it is more likely to arrive looking as you intended it to look.

The Email

• keep it short and sweet
• make sure there are no typos or errors and that the links work
• get someone else to proofread and give you an honest appraisal of what they thought of the content and its tone
• personalise the email if possible
• don’t be pushy or arrogant. Be polite and professional
• get to the point
• at the start explain: who you are and what you want
• link to examples of your work
• link to an on-line resume
• ask them if it is OK to call them in a few days time to discuss
• your contact details

Test it. Test it. Test it.
Prepare the email and save a copy. Send one to yourself and make sure it works and looks good. Double check it and get someone else to check it.

Toby has done an excellent job and I recommend reading the whole article and getting the full details.

First off I would like to thank John Chow for bringing Mixed Market Arts to my attention.

These days I am always on the look out for good, legit ways to bring in traffic and hopefully produce a little bit of passive income. I am not considering jumping into full-time blogging but have a little extra cash to pay for site expenses or even the occasional new gadget is always nice.

While browsing through Mix Market Arts I came across a post I really liked, and apparently John did to as it was one of his recommended articles, about using StumbleUpon to bring in traffic to your site. While the traffic will likely come in spikes if you blog on a regular basis you can build up a semi-consistant flow of traffic.

In his post Collin makes the following points to get you started on (ab)using StumbleUpon.

Benefits of StumbleUpon:

• You can select the exact niche that sends these visitors, so if your blog is about investing, you will get tons of people who enjoy “investing” sites, which turns into excellent clickthrough rates for your ads.
• If you do go on the “paying” route, it is far cheaper than most advertising solutions. (I still recommend the free way, as it is dead simple).
• It can help anyone who owns a website
• It is completely free
• You can learn the entire ups and downs in 15 minutes (by reading this post in its entirety)
• Tons more, take a look for yourself

Downfalls of StumbleUpon:

• 1. The traffic is inconsistent. You will get a burst of traffic one time, but then it idles down to very little, or if you write good content consistently, it will be a series of traffic spikes.
• 2. The links from the stumble pages are nofollow, so it does not help your search engine optimization
• 3. It takes up a pretty big portion on your browser

How to milk Stumbleupon for all it’s worth:

• 1. Sign up for Stumbleupon.
• 2. Register on forums.digitalpoint.com, and post a thread in the freebies section stating that you will stumble anyones website if they add you as a stumble friend. (http://*YOUR_USERNAME*.stumbleupon.com). For example, mine is raithe1337.stumbleupon.com. (Collin’s stumble url)
• 3. After you have accumulated a good number of friends, the sites you stumble now get an even larger burst of traffic to them. My stumble account has over 300 friends, but I started to notice my stumble visitors tripling when I reached 200 friends, so make that a monthly goal.
• 4. If you own a blog, exchange reviews of websites with other blogs, and then when their blog’s first post is about you, stumble their main page as well as the exact URL of the post. This will give them “2 stumbles” to their website, sending them a flood of visitors, but it will also help you in that those hundreds of visitors will be reading a review of your website.
• 5. StumbleUpon will not let you stumble your own site with hundreds of pages, until you stumble 9 other pages. With the technique shown in #4, for every 9 stumbles you make on blogs about your own, you will be allowed to stumble another one of your own pages.
• 6. Join stumble exchanges. You can make a thread on the digitalpoint freebies section, or join a stumble exchange website such as SUExchange.com, or StumbleXChange.com. People will stumble your pages in return for you stumbling theres. Both of you result in tons of free visitors, so it is mutually exclusive.
• 7. If you get a lot of stumbles in a small period of time, you get listed on the Stumble Buzz page, which will send you tons more free traffic. To raise your chances of getting on this page, only stumble your best websites or blog posts, so that with the thousands of visitors that Stumbleupon sends you, they have the highest chance of also giving you a thumbs up, sending thousands more and making your content go viral.
• 8. Stumbling sites does not cost you anything, so I recommend stumbling every website that links to your website, because the better that those sites do, the better they help you. This will also make the owners of those sites like you more if you are sending them tons of traffic. Like I said earlier, mutually exclusive.
• 9. If you own a blog or an interesting website, you can provide a stumble upon button on every post. Your readers generally shouldn’t mind, and it has the potential to send you lots more easy traffic. If your blog is big enough already, I don’t recommend this because I feel you should only stumble “your best content”. The call is yours to make though.
• 10. Like I said with stumbling sites that link to yours, another really “evil” trick is to get around that “you can only stumble another page on your website if you stumble at least 9 external sites” problem is to stumble your Digg posts, your own Stumbleupon profile, your forum profiles, your Myspace/Facebook pages, forum posts about your site, etc etc. Not only does this get around the stumbling limit, but it will also send you some more visitors.

Many thanks to Collin for a wonderful guide to using StumbleUpon

Getting contracts can be a tough job in itself and if you are new to freelancing it can be frustrating even knowing where to start. Toby Somerville has started a 3 parts series over at SitePoint that I will be covering on how to do just that, get contracts.

This post covers part one of Toby’s series. I will just be summerizing some of his points and you can read his article for the full details.

How Does it Work?

• First, find and research the web and advertising firms in your area.
• Next, send the firms an introductory email.
• Then, follow up a few days later with a phone call.

The Ground Work
Preparation is really important, potentially any of these firms could be worth thousands of dollars to you. So, it is worth putting a bit of time and effort into researching each firm — basically the same as if you were preparing for a job interview (which effectively you are).

How to Find the firms
I would start by using search engines and your local business directories i.e. the Yellow Pages. When searching look for both web firms and advertising agencies. Note: Not all advertising agencies have a web department.

Research the Firms
Once you have a list of potential firms. Research them. Try and work out whether or not they are going to be a likely source of work. Do this by; reading through their website, looking for any forum post about them, and generally giving them a good Googling. Also, look at their client lists and analysis the website itself.

Keep Notes
Keep notes on your progress with each firm including:

• who you contacted
• what was said
• the date and time of contact
• any follow up that is required

In his next post Toby will be talking about the introductory email and how to form and structure this crucial point of firs contact. Stay tuned.

Michael Kwan has written a great post on what you should consider before diving in as a freelance writer.

I am not going to go into to much detail, you can read his full post if you want that, but I will write a summary of his points.

1. Do you have enough savings to endure your growing pains?
The reality is that you will not be making a full-time income right from the get-go unless you happen to be both really talented and really lucky

2. Are you organized, motivated, and self-driven?
Because you won’t really have a set working schedule or a boss breathing down your neck, motivation becomes a huge factor in your success.

3. Are you comfortable with all the other roles you’ll have?
You may be an exceptional writer, but how are you with accounting? Customer service? Sales? When you run your own freelance writing business, you’ll be wearing a lot of different hats.

4. Can you find a healthy life-work balance?
As mentioned above, motivation can become an issue, but so can finding a healthy life-work balance. Because you can make money at any hour of the day, you could feel like you should be making money every hour of the day.

5. Do you really love writing?
This sounds obvious enough, but you’d be surprised how many potential freelancers realize that they don’t like writing as much as they thought they would. When you’re blogging for fun, writing comes easy. When you’re producing countless articles on a daily basis, the task can get pretty exhausting.

John Chow has a helpful article on improving your blogging skills/lifestyle and ideas on how to find inspiration.

1 - Write as far in advance as you feel inspired to

This is the best piece of advice I can give to ANY blogger - when you’re in the mood and writing good content - don’t stop. If you feel like you’ve got more to say just keep going because you’ll be thankful of it later. I have an “unpublished” section of Seopher.com where I can throw pieces of content for a rainy day (like drafts on Wordpress) which is really useful because we all hit low days where you really don’t want to blog. On those days I cherry pick a piece of content and publish it - meaning the site doesn’t seem inactive but I’ve not really had to do anything.

2 - Schedule posts to go live in the future when you’re busy

If you know you’re going to be busy (or on Holiday, otherwise engaged etc) then I recommend combining the point I made in number one with the ability to schedule posts to go live in the future. This means that if I’m going away for the weekend I can take 1-2 posts out of my drafts and schedule them to go live later. I don’t use Wordpress but it’s really easy to do (when writing a post click “post timestamp” on the right hand side and edit the timestamp to be some point in the future). This is a great way to give yourself “time off” from the blog without handing it over to someone else.

3 - Hand it over to someone else with guest posts

Sometimes you don’t have the time or inspiration to maintain a sizable catalogue of draft posts for future use, so what happens if you actually need some? Fortunately it’s not too hard to find people who will write a couple of guest posts for you (taking the strain off yourself). Clearly there are pitfalls with this because people came to your site to read your content but ultimately it’s a great way of keeping blogging enjoyable.

4 - Write a series of articles

This is one I love to use because it can be hard to find inspiration on cold, dark January evenings, so picking a suitably wide topic and turning it into a series of articles can really help things move in the right direction. This means that you already know what your next [however-many] posts are going to be about and you can think about them in advance. This in turn results in higher quality content (due to the extra thought gone into the post) and offers a valuable resource to readers. Eventually you could use the series as the basis for an (e)book.

5 - Post a summary / blast from the past

This may seem like scraping the barrel somewhat but there’s actually a good reason for doing this. How many of your readers have been reading your blog since it first started? Probably not many. Therefore if you have some gems in your back catalogue it can be worthwhile bringing them back to life for your new readers to look over. This is also helpful because content can be re-submitted to Digg when it’s over 365 days old, so older content can be thrown back into the social-news arena for more coverage. This is great because it can result in masses of exposure for seemingly little effort.

6 - Review something

They don’t even have to be paid reviews (shock, horror). Sometimes you can just review something for the sake of something interesting to talk about. If you stumble across something your readers would enjoy and you’ve been struggling to find inspiration, then go beyond just posting a link. There are a few advantages to reviewing stuff randomly: it can prompt people into asking for paid reviews and it can also open communications with the people who are involved with whatever you reviewed… It can be a nice opening to a lot of good things.

John Cow has a great article on how to become a great freelance writer. If writing is something you like to do and want to make some cash doing something you love, whether part-time or full-time, this is good read with some great advice.

1. If you want to become a freelance writer, you have many markets in which you can dabble. For most, online markets are the easiest to break into. As a writer specializing in online works, you will be creating articles for webmasters, sales pages for affiliate marketers, and web copy for corporations. Just remember, you do not have to necessarily make all of your money online. You can branch out to other markets such as magazines, local newspapers, newsletters, etc.

2. To become a successful freelance writer, you need to bone up on your marketing and networking skills. If you want to have success sooner rather than later, surround yourself with people who can help you achieve your goals. In many cases, you will be able to turn one freelance writing client into another, and so on. As long as you are always networking, your business will always grow.

3. You want to be a freelance writing stud – produce high quality work. Just as Johncow.com produces high quality content, you need to do the same if you want your career to take off. Remember, your clients are not paying for trash. They want your best, and when you give it to them, you will find plenty more work waiting for you around the bend.

Looking for a .com or .net after your name? Search on the internet is quite difficult, as there are number of companies offering .com and .net. So here are the few tips how to pick a good one.

There are numerous registrars they differ from prices, services, support, management, etc. This is the reason that choosing a good registrar is very important.

Further if you are not satisfied with the services of registrar with whom you have register your domain name, then at that time you can transfer your domain to other registrar.

What to look for?
Some of the most important aspects that should be considered while choosing the registrar for registering a domain name:

ICANN Accreditation: The domain name registrar should be accredited by ICANN (which stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). This ensures you that the domain name which you have registered is legally a part of the internet.

Reliability: The domain registrar must be reliable and solvent, as they are the one who can protect the domain of domain registrants from losing their domains.

Location: Location is the other important factor which states that the domain registrars are subject to the laws of the country where they are located but some have been refuse to grant domain names that are offensive under the laws of their home country.

Contract Agreement: Many of the domain registrants think that, once the domain name registers, is theirs forever including all rights. But it is not like that, the contract which you have sign with the registrar could affect you in a number of ways. Many of the registrars have the right to cancel your domain name for certain reasons, generally when you use the domain for illegal or spamming purposes. So be sure to read the rights and policies carefully before you pay for it.

Price: Prices differs from one registrar to other. Though registering a domain names are much cheaper these days, but still there are many registrars who offer the higher prices. Nowadays, many of the registrars offered “free” domain name services, but make sure that the domain name which you have register is yours or the registrar company’s, as some of them buy the domain themselves and allow you to use it as a name only and some of them compel you to place large frames full of advertisements on you site in exchange for the domain name. While comparing prices, you must also look for many other factors that are provided by the registrar, that are customer support, testimonies etc.

Support: While registering a domain name, check whether the registrar is providing a good customer support i.e. it should be 24×7.

Domain Transfer: Check the transfer policy of the registrar before registering your domain name. Normally you can’t transfer a name during the first 60 days after registration, but the period could be much longer. Don’t expect any registrar to refund money you’ve paid for months of service you won’t use. Sometimes, there may be restrictions on your ability to transfer the domain name that means the registrar must be giving poor service.

Contact Information: One must look for the contact information of the registrar where you can easily get to them without any effort. You might want to test them to confirm whether they are available before you buy from them.

Hosting: Many domain registrar offer hosting services, as two in one package is a very simple and effective for register domain and host you site globally on web.

Management: Domain management method is the most important factor to think about. This normally works after registering the domain name. In other words, once you have registered the domain, how do you manage the information related with it? You may want to change contact information or name servers in the future. Many of them provides a control panel for managing your domains, which allows you to simply log in on the web and update the information you want to change.

Consider these factors when choosing where to register your domain name to come up with the registrar offering the perfect combination of price, service, management and support for you.

What to Avoid?
Simply, keep in mind that free domain names are generally free only for one or two years, after which the registrar will charge you for the annual or biennial fee. In such cases the provider of the free domain name pays only for the first billing from the registrar. So you should study the offer carefully while choosing for free domain registrar.

Most of the web hosting plans at domain registrars are feature poor and over priced. If you are tempted by one, think twice and check out other hosts before buying web hosting from you domain registrar.

Thus, there are huge numbers of registrars varying from prices and services are available nowadays. You only have to choose the right one which suits your requirements.

Resource Info:
Ricky Williams is a media contact of QualiSpace working with them from last four years. QualiSpace is the Reliable Web Hosting and ICANN Accredited Domain Registration Company which provide 24×7 customer support and services.

Author Info:

Ricky Williams is a media contact of QualiSpace working with them from last four years. QualiSpace is the Reliable Web Hosting and ICANN Accredited Domain Registration Company which provide 24×7 customer support and services.

To those who are not familiar with affiliate marketing, two-tier could be a new term to you but to those who are involved in this kind of money-making experience know that it provides a steady stream of income. Two-tier is an enticing feature of a particular affiliate program wherein, affiliates are allowed to sign-up additional affiliates below them. So that when the sub-affiliates otherwise known as second tier affiliates, earns a commission, the affiliate above receives a commission too.

In two-tier systems, the first tier of commission is just like in the usual affiliate program. The sole difference is that it has an additional tier/s or sub-affiliates, whereby marketers also gain a commission once the people that the additional tiers referred to the program generate sales. Theoretically, affiliate programs can have multi-tier programs with infinite number of tiers, however, there are practical limitations. As tiers increase, the affiliate program draws more webmasters who are mostly interested in gaining profit from other’s work and effort.

Two-Tier affiliate programs are also recognized as Multi-Level Marketing. When you sign-up for an affiliate program, you are identified as the first tier and the person that you have recruited or encouraged to sign up is the second tier. If there are additional tiers, then the system can now be regarded as multi-level marketing (MLM). But today, MLM isn’t as effective and successful as it was several years ago. It is because at present, affiliates can freely select from thousands of affiliate programs and they can quickly switch from one program to another.

You are however, wrong if you’re thinking that you can depend on your second tier to do the job for you. So if you want to use two-tier affiliate programs to your advantage and generate more income by encouraging sub-affiliates to sign-up below you, make sure that you carefully choose your affiliate merchant. Pick those merchants who generate a stable stream of high quality products, give high or just commissions, offer real time tracking, furnishes you with a proven and tested advertising arsenal and treat their affiliates very well. You can also sign-up for the merchant who gives high visitors-to-sales conversion rate.

It is also advisable if you engage yourself with a web merchant that has a user-friendly website which you can access anytime to monitor your statistics including visits and sales. And if possible, choose the one with powerful marketing tools which you can use in promoting their products.

You’re just wasting your time and effort and worse, damaging your integrity once you promote poor affiliate programs because your visitor will surely presume that the product or service you are reselling must be dreadful too. That’s the reason why it is important to pick first-rate affiliate programs. Through these, you can not only build up a good relationship with your visitor, but also, you can easily get more tiers to sign-up under you. You should also be cautious of some affiliate programs that give more importance on the profits to be earned in taking on other affiliates than on the income from sales, because you’ll eventually find out that someone has already closed those sales without informing you. Usually, this kind of affiliate program offers a very low first-tier payment but a sky-scraping second-tier commission.

If you want to start an affiliate program of your own, you have to decide whether it will be a single tier or two-tier affiliate program. Who am I to say which of these two programs are better? But let me tell you the benefits you could get out of two-tier affiliate program.

First, your profit will increase due to increased sales from the customers that your second tier has referred. Second, you have a much broader customer base to which you can sell your products and services. You gain more and stable income because the customers referred by your affiliate and sub-affiliates could probably develop a lifetime loyalty on your site and your products. Plus, you have an army of sub-affiliates who will promote and resell your products and services to their visitors and subscribers.

Two-tier programs have been a proven winner and should be the number one choice for the budding affiliate, as well as for the affiliate program managers. When you start gaining profits from your site as well as your tiers, this is now the right time to say that you have used two-tier affiliate program to your advantage.

Author Info:

Steve is the CEO & Editor in Chief of http://www.articleland.co.uk and http://www.informationbooth.net. He is offering a free ebook on his site entitled Article Marketing Avalanche, a great read, a great book, go get it now.

A recent survey by MarketingSherpa of over 2400 in-house marketers and over 700 marketing agency executives found search engine optimization (SEO) to be the second most effective tool for generating ROI, right behind email marketing. Good news for all those start-up internet marketing agencies.

But a closer look at the numbers revealed a slightly different story. Although 36 percent of respondents rated SEO to have good ROI, another 21 percent slammed it as hard to gauge. The result was that SEO also placed third, out of seven marketing tactics, for least effective.

Why would a tactic heralded as being on the cutting edge of internet marketing, and praised for it’s ROI also be criticized for being hard to gauge? There are a few reasons, most of them related to the relatively short period of time SEO has been used as a marketing tool and the trepidations most business owners feel when paying money for a relatively new strategy with graduated pay-off.

Measure This.

There still isn’t a good, solid analytics tool that can separate SEO leads from SEM leads. Google Analytics, wildly popular because it is effective and free, only measures return from SEM leads, and most other high-level analytics tools, like Click Tracks for example, inevitably mix up SEO and SEM. Frustrated business owners who couldn’t get solid numbers about SEO versus SEM probably contributed to those who judged SEO “hard to gauge.”

Time, time, time.

Getting on the first, or even second, page of Google for a popular key word takes serious time, effort, and patience. After all only 10 websites in the entire country are capable of getting on the first page of Google for a specific keyword or phrase. Return on investment, in the form of a higher profile or better leads, may arrive within two months, or take over a year. In fact, any good report on SEO’s ROI should evaluate expenditure and profits on an annual basis, rather than going month by month.

The Size factor.

Companies with the time and resources to wait things out see a tremendous jump in profits thanks to SEO. Smaller companies who become frustrated part-way through the process or who lose the ability to fund SEO or who choose a cheap and ineffective SEO company are less likely, or, rather, not likely at all, to see the fruit of their investment. This factor is also probably the reason that MarketingSherpa’s survey found that 43 percent of “Big Spenders” (companies who spend more than $25,000 per month on SEO) plan on increasing their SEO budgets at least 11 percent next year, but only 35 percent of all respondents surveyed were willing to do the same.

Youth.

At the end of the day, SEO just hasn’t been around that long. People like the idea of it because it is cutting edge, but the flip side of cutting edge technology is that it often hasn’t had time to really prove itself. Businesses praise SEO’s obvious advantages (zero cost per click, long-term rankings, no constant bidding wars) but feel less sure when it comes to paying up front costs that will give birth to results at some distant point in the future. There are no standards in the industry, no rules, and most of the literature on SEO is available on the internet, in opinion articles and through blogs.
Is SEO an effective tool? YES. We can’t say it enough and the stats speak for themselves. According to Forrester Research, 93 percent of Internet users use search engines and 97 percent of those users never get beyond the first three results they find. Not only that, but thanks to an ad-averse culture, 76.7 percent of internet users use the organic, rather than paid listings. But search engine optimization is not cheap and not easy. Anyone who promises you first page status for 500 bucks a year is lying. So count the cost, research the benefits, and prepare for an exciting journey.

About Blueliner NY

Blueliner NY is an internet marketing agency and web development firm specializing in search marketing tactics including SEO, social media, online advertising and web analytics. Visit www.bluelinerNY.com for details or contact Dali Singh at dsingh@bluelinerny.com.

BluelinerNy - Internet Marketing Agency

Author Info:

Dali Singh is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of BluelinerNY.com, an internet marketing agency based in New York. She is responsible for the implementation of Blueliner’s marketing strategies including SEO, interactive PR, social media and search friendly web design. For details, visit www.bluelinerNY.com or email dsingh@bluelinerny.com.

Cascading Style Sheets

Two types of style sheets: Internal and External

Internal - You insert your style code right into your html code.
These stylesheets should only be used if you are intending to
create a specific page with a specific style. If you want to be
able to make global changes to your website using only one style
sheet, you have to use….

External Stylesheets - Instead of putting all the style code into
your html code, you can create a single document with your css
code and link to it within your webpages code. It would look
something like this

<head>
<title>Webpage title</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="http://www.yourdomain.com/css"/>
</head>

If you decide to use an internal stylesheet, you have to put your
css style wihin the following tags:

<style type="text/css">
</style>

All css or links to the external stylesheets have to go in
between the {head} tags

Now about Css Classes vs. ID’s

The one major difference between a class and an id is that
classes can be used multiple times within the same page while an
Id can only be used once per page.

Example:

ID - The global navigation of your site, or a navigation bar. A
footer, header, etc. Only items that appear in only one place
per page.

Class - Anything that you would use multiple times in your page,
such as titles, subtitles, headlines, and the like.

Creating ID ’s

To create an Id in your css, you would start with the number sign
(#) and then your label of the id. Here’s an example

#navigation {
float:left;
}

To insert the id in your html, you would do something like this

<div id="navigation">
</div>

You can also insert an id within another one like this

<div id="navigation">
<div id="left>

</div>
</div>

Remember to close the id’s in order.

Now, onto css classes.

Creating Classes

To create a class in your css, use this

.subtitle {
color: #000000;
}

To insert the class into your html, do this

<p class="subtitle">
</p>

Now, you can use the same class repeatedly in the same page
unlike Id’s.

I also want to tell you something about link attributes. You
should always keep them in this order:

a {
color: #006699;
text-decoration: none;
font-size: 100%;
}

a:link {
color: #006699;
text-decoration: none;
}

a:visited {
color: #006699;
text-decoration: none;
}

a:hover {
color: #0000FF;
text-decoration: underline;
}

a:active {
color: #FF0000
}

Of course, you can change the colors and text-decorations. This
is just something I cut out of my code!

Now, this was just a very very brief explanation of the vital
elements needed when structuring your css. I have a good feeling
that when you download top style lite, you will learn how to use
the hundreds of attributes in your classes and id’s

Good Luck in Your Web Designing Efforts!

Author Info:

Eric McArdle is the publisher of the TrafficaZine Online Marketing Newsletter which is a publication designed to assist the online marketing and/or web designing entrepreneur with the basic tools and resources that will greatly assist them in taking further steps into bettering their online business. http://www.trafficazine.com