Getting Tough On Online Marketing/Promoting A Website (Part 2 Of 3)

eBooksI remember when eBooks were the newest trend in advertising. This was something that people would suggest for online website owners to do if they wanted to increase their traffic. They used to say that you should write a couple of eBooks and give them away for free on your website and of course post your eBook on other websites where possible. If you don’t know how eBooks work, they’re a lot like article writing, where you write some good information about a certain topic and include your website link in the information, put it into a PDF file, place it into a zipped folder for easy download, and then pass it around for free or even sell it. This craze caught on and soon there were thousands, then millions, and now billions of eBooks floating around on the Internet due to all the website owners that were now writing them. Many of these eBooks are only a couple of pages in length (Less than 1000 words). There are even websites still on the web trying to sell their eBooks, you know the ones that say along the lines of “I’ve made a million dollars in just six months. Purchase my eBook to learn the secrets of how you can too”. Whenever I see one of these websites, I immediately close out. If they actually made a million dollars in six months, would they really be given away their secrets and why not just give away the eBook for free, since they’ve already made all that money anyways? Again, it’s just another marketing pitch to make you purchase their product. The information they’re selling, you can most likely find for free by doing a search in one of the major search engines, so DON’T BE FOOLED.Why doesn’t this method work anymore? It’s simply really; the eBook market place was overwhelmed. Too many people were writing too many eBooks, which caused too many eBooks circulating on the web. If you wrote an eBook now, it would just get lost in all the other eBooks on the Internet. eBooks are also not very search engine friendly, since they are in a PDF file and so search engines are unable to look for keywords in the file to bring it up in the search results. If you had to write something, I would say writing articles are a much better way to go, then writing an eBook. People also recognized that most eBooks were being written just so that webmasters could promote their websites, so many of the eBooks have the same kind of information, it’s just worded differently. People don’t want to spend a lot of time looking through useless information.You can find this article and several more at www.T-ShirtShowdown.com.Banners/Text LinksThis is probably one of the oldest ways to market/promote a website and it’s still being used effectively today. This is where you usually have to pay to place your banner or text link on another website that generates a lot of traffic. You obviously want to place your advertisement on a website that is related to the products or services that you offer. Now if you own a website that accepts advertisements, then you want to make sure that you don’t have too many on one page as many people find too many advertisements annoying and they will leave your website if this is the case. NEVER use advertisement pop-ups because pop-ups are now known as the most annoying thing on a website (there are anti-popup killer programs, so it’s not effective to have them anymore anyways.), and people generally don’t like it when advertisements are always right up in their face. If people are interested, they will click your banner or text link, but if they find your advertisement to be annoying, then they are less likely to visit.Quality incoming text links are now required by the major search engines for you to be ranked higher in the search results. Exchanging links with other websites has become a necessity in the online business world. Websites with a high PR (Page Rank) rating will boost your own website in the search results, so it’s always better to post your URL on websites that have a higher PR then yourself. Trying to get websites with great PR to exchange links with you, however, is quite a challenge, as these websites obviously don’t want to exchange links with a low PR site because it doesn’t help them in return.You can find this article and several more at www.T-ShirtShowdown.com.E-mail MarketingI’ve heard many people say that E-mail advertising was the way to go when marketing/promoting a website. It may have been a method in the past when the internet was new and people got very excited just to get an E-mail, but not anymore. I’m against E-mail advertising, since I personally don’t like to receive spam/junk mail myself. This however was one method that I had never tried and I decided to finally test it out to see how effective it really was and what all the hype was about. I located several sources that claimed to have several thousand opt-in E-mail addresses. For those who don’t know what opt-in E-mail addresses are, these are E-mail addresses where people have agreed to receive offers for a certain topic by E-mail. Hotmail.com is one-source for selling opt-in E-mail addresses and they sell their E-mail addresses to anyone who wants to purchase them for advertising purposes. E-mail marketing by the way, is definitely not for people with an Internet dial-up connection as you have to download a huge file size, which can be as big as 1GB or more that contains all the E-mail addresses. You then have to download a special program to handle sending out mass E-mails, which by the way, takes a very long time to send the E-mails (about 30 E-mails every minute). Out of ten thousand E-mail addresses that I sent, only fifty were active and were able to get through (0.005 success rate). Due to this result, I decided that it wasn’t worth my time and that this method was no longer effective.Why doesn’t this method work anymore? NOBODY LIKES TO RECEIVE SPAM. Some people consider any type of E-mail advertising spam, which of course isn’t true, but that’s the way they see it, so most of the E-mails you send are going to go straight to the trash can or spam folder. People are also aware of websites that sell their E-mail addresses to marketing companies, so people usually have two E-mail addresses, a “Real” and a “Fake”. They use their real E-mail address for family, friends, and any other person that they know won’t give away their E-mail address. The fake E-mail address is for when they sign up for anything on the Internet. When they are getting too much spam in the fake E-mail address, all they do is close their account and create another one. There are plenty of free E-mail hosting sites for them to do this like the most common hotmail.com, which it’s known to be used for junk mail. This is why I was only able to send fifty E-mails out of ten thousand because many of the E-mails were closed down, probably because of too much spam. Another thing is that most E-mail hosts now have software to prevent any unwanted E-mails. This is where the person who sent the E-mail, receives an E-mail from the address they sent it to and they must now manually click on a link in the E-mail to activate the E-mail so that it’s sent to the persons inbox, otherwise after a certain amount of days it’s automatically deleted without anybody reading it. Many website hosts will also terminate your website if they find you’ve been involved with spamming, so it’s not worth the risk.You can find this article and several more at www.T-ShirtShowdown.com.Forums/BlogsI remember a time when you could place any kind of HTML code into a forum and it would be allowed. There were hardly any restrictions as to what you could place on another websites forum. This was easy for website owners to insert code to advertise their website and of course the idea eventually caught on where more and more people started advertising on forums to the point where they were spamming and many forums were only being used to advertise. It was also becoming increasingly easy for hackers to also place their code into the forums and infect everyone who visited the forum. Due to these problems webmasters have taken serious measures to ensure that their forums are spam free and also hacker free. This meant updating the forums so that only certain kinds of codes were allowed. Well as time progressed, there were new codes being created that could get around the restrictions. Many forums today have decided not to allow HTML tags whatsoever anymore because of the risks involved and on most forums you’re only allowed to place a signature at the bottom of every post you make. Some forums have even gone as far as creating customized tags that can be used in the forums instead of standard HTML coding like [URL=][/URL] instead of .Most people are aware that you should place your website URL in your signature in a forum or blog to get more traffic, but many people also know that the reason people place a URL in a signature is to market/promote. I still think that this method can be effective, but I also think that it’s not as effective as it used to be (50/50 chance that someone will click on your signature link). It’s still a great way however, to bring in extra incoming links to your website so that you can rank higher in the search engines. You will of course have a much better traffic rate if your talking about a subject in your forum post and then refer the reader to visit your website for an example, like if you want to see more articles go to www.T-ShirtShowdown.com. This kind of method obviously takes a lot of time and effort, but most websites keep their forum posts around for a very long time because it helps market/promote their website, so you’ll always have a permanent link that’ll be around for quite some time. You also want to be sure to write as many posts on the forums as you possibly can because search engines are great for picking up on the keywords in your posts if someone does a search. One more thing that you should keep in mind is that you should get involved in the forum. Don’t go to a forum to post just one message so you can get another incoming link. Webmasters and their members don’t like it when someone doesn’t get involved and you’ll only get your post deleted or criticized, which isn’t good for your website, because some people consider it “Spamming The Forums”. It’s also a good idea to know what you’re talking about, so find a forum that you can respond to that will be helpful.You can find this article and several more at www.T-ShirtShowdown.com.Continued in Part 3If you’d like to copy this article and place it on your website or pass it around, then you are FREE to do so as long as you copy the article in it’s entirety, keep the links intact, and don’t make any modifications whatsoever.

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