Maintaining websites is very crucial in the highly competitive world of online business. Without your website, you cannot reach out to a broad segment of population that are increasingly turning to the Internet for their personal and business needs.

A static website does not help very much either. Most of the time, people are looking for information that they can use for their own purposes. If your website simply contains static pages, you are not taking advantage of the benefits of Web 2.0. Come on! Get out of your twentieth century shell and embrace the twenty-first century’s Web 2.0 platform!

Here are five easy steps on how to promote your website.

1. Conduct interviews with experts in the field. Your customers are looking for information in the web. You better give it to them. By getting hold of an expert and getting his ideas, you accomplish three things: you give your readers valuable information; you also establish the credibility of your website and your online business; and lastly, people will want more of what you have to offer. This can translate to greater traffic to your website.

2. Cover breaking stories related to your business. Engaging the market is an important element of your business. If you know of a development in your field of business, then go ahead and cover it. Just don’t repeat what has already been written elsewhere. You need to personalize the news and relate it to your business.

3. Offer freebies and contests. If it’s free, people will come asking for the products from you. After all, they’re not paying anything for it. Now, if your freebies and contests are effective, they will come back looking for more. This way, you can have a steady stream of website visitors who can take a look at your products.

4. Conduct and publish research online. Even if your business is but small scale now, you can offer to publish a research online. The topics do not necessarily have to be complicated. If the research is all about what people need, they will appreciate it.

5. Get back to anyone who contacts you. Don’t be a recluse or a snob! When people contact you, make sure that you get back to them within 24 hours. They will know that you are serious with what you are doing. They’ll also think you have excellent customer service!

Tags: websiteNo Comments.

If you are working for sales or other industries, you know by now that networking is important. The same is true for your website in the internet. Your website is important in your business. But what use is it if people do know about the existence of your website? What you know definitely matters, but whom you know also matters greatly!

One key to promoting your website is networking—both online and offline! Here’s how to promote your website by networking.

Use online advertisement platforms such as Google Adwords, Bidvertiser, Adbrite, Text-link-Ads and many others. Carefully select the keywords related to your industry and carefully place them on these ad platforms. When you do this, bloggers and their reader will notice your website.

Use online social networking. You can use MySpace, Facebook, Multiply, and LinkedIn among others in promoting your website. When you network with friends in these social networking sites, their friends and the friends of their friends can be made aware of your website and the services that you offer.

Establish your Company Blog. When you this, you personalize your company and people will know what you are up to. Blogs are also a great way to capture the attention of the 80 million or so bloggers all over the world. Blogs also have tags, which helps your website get noticed by search engines more.

Attend conventions and forums on your industry. Tell your friends about your website. If they enjoy visiting their website, they are sure to tell their friends about it and soon the word-of-mouth will spread. Also, you need to show the world that you exist and that you are serious in your industry. This will also give you the chance to meet people and hear success stories in using the Internet for their business.

Networking is much needed in the online world. Your website needs traffic in order for you to convert your sales goals. Go out there and meet people online and offline.

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Blogging is one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0. It has given way for individuals all over the world to publish their thoughts online and what they think about the events happening all around them. Some blogs are wonderfully excellent, some are A-okay, others are on the average while a good number are also idiotic.

For a blog to thrive in the Internet, you have to have readers. What’s the use of publishing your thoughts if no one is going to read about them anyway? Here’s how to market your blog in five easy steps.

1. Be an expert in your niche. If you have selected a particular topic to write about, establish yourself as an expert in that field. This way, more people will turn to your blog for what you have to say.

2. Improve the design of your blog. People nowadays are highly visual. They need pictures. They need graphics. And if you don’t give it to them, their eyes might get hurt by too much text on the screen. This also means that the layout and the design of your blog should be excellent.

3. Know how to optimize your site for search engines. Search engine optimization is becoming popular in the internet because it can get your site listed on the first pages of search results. This means that you get more people to visit your site.

4. Get your feeds up and running. Feeds may come through RSS or Atom. Check your blog or your website if these features are being offered. If so, choose to offer full feeds so that people can subscribe to RSS readers and they can get updated right away.

5. Link to other blogs and websites. Although you want to keep your readers for yourself, you need to link out to other websites to direct your readers to other sites that offer more resources for the topics you are dealing with.

It takes time for your blog to grow and become popular, but if you knew how to market your blog in five easy steps, you will reap your efforts pretty soon.

Tags: BloggingNo Comments.

There are already millions of blogs out there. If you want to stand out and truly promote your business, you have to offer something unique. Although this is increasingly becoming a big challenge, you need to sit down for a while, plan, and commit to building great content and traffic to your site.

 When you establish a website or a blog, you should first choose your own catchy domain name. It can be your own name, or the name of your business that encapsulates what your website is all about.

 After this, get a webhost and install a Content Management System. You can choose between Wordpress and Moveable Type if you are establishing a blog. Joomla or Drupal are good options when you are planning a full-blown website. If you are not a techie person though, don’t worry. Most webhosts provide you assistance in setting up your site. Just ask.

 When you start writing the articles for your site, you should keep in mind that you are writing for people and not for the search engines. When you write about what interest people, then your traffic will grow exponentially. You therefore need to conduct research on what the interests of people are. In order to do this, you can use several tools such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, Sitepoint, SEOBook Keyword Research, and Hotwords.

 Sure, maintaining a website or a blog is hard work, but your business can greatly benefit from the exposure and the traffic that your blog can bring.

Tags: BloggingNo Comments.

Web 2.0 is driven by open sourcing and community spirit in the Internet. If you are able to take advantage of this, your website is off to a good level of web traffic.

You need to learn how to use social bookmarking effectively. Social bookmarking is one of the benchmarks of Web 2.0. The idea behind social bookmarking is that people would want to tag and bookmark their favorite websites in the internet. When the preferences of thousands of people are taken into account, then some websites will rise to the top as the most popular ones.

Since a lot of people tend to join the bandwagon, those at the top of the list would tend to enjoy greater popularity still. The originator of online social bookmarking is Del.icio.us in 2003. Since then, this site has enjoyed immense popularity. If you can write great content that people are looking for you might just use the power of Del.icio.us for you’re the traffic of your website.

We’ve mentioned Digg in passing in a previous post. Digg is essentially a website dedicated to gathering news headlines from all over. Instead of having editors though, Digg relies on the inputs of users. If you are a Digg user, you can easily navigate through stories featured on the site. If you a particular article catches your attention, you can “Digg It.”

Viral traffic is one of the best features of Web 2.0. In this age of amazing connectivity, users can easily refer a product or a website to one another, making it easier for websites to gain the exposure they need. What you need therefore is a strategy to learn what kinds of topics and niches are grabbing the attention of users. When you understand that and incorporate it into your business model, your website will get the traffic it needs.

Tags: Social BookmarkingNo Comments.

So you’ve created a website. You post at least three articles a day, put some ads and monetization strategies. But then, a few weeks after, you’d wonder why the number of visitors to your site is low. Even if you have amazing content, web traffic is still the biggest determinant of success in the internet world. Here are four tips in promoting your website.

1. Write good content. You might have encountered this famous phrase before: “content is king!” It is true. If you write compelling content on your website, people will get hooked and expect your next articles.

2. Visit other blogs and sites in your niche. It takes one to know one. If you express interest to other bloggers and web administrators in your niche, they will reciprocate and visit your site, too. In true Web 2.0 spirit, you should leave intelligent comments that invite response.

3. Use social networking sites. This where Web 2.0 comes in. There are a number of social bookmarking and social networking sites that you can benefit from. Digg.com, Stumbleupon, Technorati, and Alexa among others are good tools to promote your website. When you gain rank in these sites, people are bound to visit your site leading to an increase in your web traffic.

4. Join forums. Another great way in promoting your site is by joining forums where you exchange ideas with other people on various topics. Just make sure that the forum you join is consistent with the topic or niche that your website is covering.

These tips are but the tip of the iceberg. Continue writing, continue researching and persevere! In due time your efforts for driving traffic to your site will pay off.

Tags: BloggingNo Comments.

Israeli company LabPixies continue to dominate widget space since it was founded in March 2006. The company stayed small, making it more streamlined and focused in developing widgets. The company has remained low profile since then. Yet, even if the company has been on a low profile, it won several good projects, most notably, the official crossword widget of the New York Times.

LabPixies is in competition with several widget developers such as Rockyou, Slide, Clearspring, Goowy, Widgetbox, and Gigya among others. These other widget developers have a number of fund sources while LabPixies managed to raise a total of $1 million from various investors all over Israel.

The widgets created by LabPixies are viewed by 41 million people every month. This translates to about 750 million widget views every month. Initially, LabPixies only created widgets for iGoogle. But more recently, they started developing widgets for Live.com and Netvibes among others.

Although LabPixies only has ten employees, it continues to fulfill its potentials, creating widgets for a number of big name clients. Among their most popular widgets are the NY Times crossword puzzle, Defender, Space Invaders, and a Babylon language translation tool. On top of this, they are also offering interactive widgets made for advertising.

Tags: Web 2.0No Comments.

If you went to College, then you would know that Economics isn’t for the fainthearted. This is why the guys behind FiscalZen.com have something to blog about. FiscalZen provides economic principles and wisdom in layman’s terms. Even your classmate who failed economics in college would be able to understand it.

More than just financial advice, this blog also has suggestions on how to save, what is going on in the stock market, and which stocks would make good investments. There’s also an added extra. If you’re always on the lookout for sale and ways of making money online, then FiscalZen is just the right place for you. There are discounts being featured from all over the web.

You can also participate in the discussion by leaving your comments on the blog. If you don’t want to type in the URL on your browser every morning, then subscribe to the RSS feeds of the site.

By doing so, you will be helping yourself gather more insights on personal finance, investing, and smart spending. The website claims against quick rich schemes and other dubious ways of making money. Rather, their posts are geared towards saving money and making worthy investments. Since it is written for the general public, you won’t have to worry about encountering too much financial jargons.

Tags: Small BusinessNo Comments.

Good news to SEO practitioners and bloggers who do not want to shell out their precious dollars over keyword list software. Hotwords.com is now available. This website lists the 100,000 most popular searches made by people on the web. It also offers trend and ranking reports.

Hotwords now has more than 1.7 million keywords and phrases in its database. On top of that, it also keeps keyword reports from the previous year. Hotwords collects data from popular search engines. Reports are generated daily so as to spot trends more easily. As a Web 2.0 tool, the possibilities with Hotwords are endless. It is also 100% free.

The website is currently in beta stage. As such, it is only operating at 40% of its data collection capabilities. Although this is but 40%, it is still equivalent to 2.5 million searches everyday. That’s still quite a lot!

Hotwords does not filter adult content in its results page in order to display fully accurate search data. The site administrators are currently working on an option that allows users to utilize adult content filtering system.

This website would be an amazing tool for web administrators, bloggers, and any other online buffs who want to analyze what most people are searching for in the Internet.

Tags: SEONo Comments.

With the debates on climate change and global warming, you are bound to encounter a website on how to become green-minded and care for the environment. In searching for environmentally sensitive companies or those that are ecologically minded, where should a person go? Instead of consulting a search engine that scours through all of the Web, you can choose to logon to Greenona and search everything about being green.

As a vertical search engine, Greenona is dedicated to searching information about the environment. Its homepage features a search bar in the whole page and allows you to review the top searches about he environment. Central Europe appears to be the area where most searches come from so they have more green-minded people there.

GuideMeGreen on the other hand operates from UK and aims to promote businesses and brands  promoting the welfare of the environment. The founders of the company kept a strong sense of fairness and ethics, coupled with a passionate desire to improve the situation of the environment. They do have a lot of green-minded businesses ranging from jewelry, clothing, restaurants and even hotels. By promoting these brands, the company also promotes the welfare of the planet earth and enables other people to be more aware of the environmental impact of the products and services that they are paying for.

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