Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

Review Sites Package – Personal Use – BDN

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

A template pack that really works and can bring maximum results. The amazing quality of these templates has no equal, a group of expert marketers, coders and designers has developed this set of templates for you with two goals in mind, increase conversion rates and persuade prospects to buy, that’s all.

Read More: Review Sites Package – Personal Use – BDN

How To Prepare An Effective Design Brief For Graphic Design Projects

Monday, December 7th, 2009

A thoroughly prepared client brief is half the success of a rebranding or design project. Attaining all the necessary and relevant information from the client and a comprehensive insight into the client’s brand provides you with a great foundation for the right brand identity and design solution.

As a designer or brand consultant, a properly prepared client brief gives multiple sources of ideas to work with. Unless you have a clear understanding of what the client wants and needs, you waste your time trying to design something out of nothing and the client ends up spending more money than budgeted for as a result of the required modifications – which naturally makes both parties very happy?.

Depending on the particular project you will need a specific design brief. That means if you are developing a website or creating a business card, the client design brief will be different. However, there is some general information about your company and what you want to achieve, which should give a good idea in any design situation. Here are some general questions that will help me and fellow designers and consultants:

1. Title

2. What is the nature of your business? What does your business do?

3. What is your target market? a. Age b. Sex c. Income d. Occupation e. Location

4. What is unique about your business or product?

5. Who is your competition?

6. What is your aim? What are your goals?

7. How do you want your clients to feel about the brand? What is the message you want to communicate?

8. What is your budget? Range?  – Providing a rough guide enables the consultant/designer with an idea of the type of marketing and design solution that can be provided to you.

9. What is your deadline?

10. Provide the designer with current and past design and marketing materials.

To see how you can improve the image of your brand click here: Graphic Design Melbourne

Building Affiliate Marketing Websites The Easy Way

Friday, December 4th, 2009

There are some myths in affiliate marketing, which attract a lot of people to it believing they are true. First is they think managing an online business is easy and second, they think that one can make a fortune through online marketing in an instant. Probably not even 10% of those who are into affiliate marketing became rich overnight. There may be some who fortunately achieved overwhelming success in just a short span of time after setting up an affiliate program, but not a majority of them can confidently say they only had luck. Anyone who is successful in this kind of business would say he worked hard to get to where he is right now. Success in affiliate marketing takes time and hard work, but it’s worth it.

If you are planning to start an affiliate program, one of the things you have to consider is having your own website, not just an ordinary website but a professional looking one. How do you build an affiliate marketing website? What are the easy steps to build one? First, you must have already decided on the theme or niche of your website. It would be better if you already have an idea what products or services to promote as this would help you plan the design and lay-out of your web pages. The next thing to do is to choose a domain name and get it hosted. The domain name is a unique name used to label the actual address of your website on the Internet.  In deciding what domain name to register, look into the type of products you are endorsing and the theme of your site. Having the right keywords in your domain name would give you better chances of drawing more visitors to your website. Also, choose a top level domain or extension, such as .com because it is more popular. In selecting your web host, consider the security of servers and up time guarantees.

Now, you can start creating your web-pages. Don’t be disheartened when you know a little in this field. There are page generation tools and fast launch sites available online; you just have to search for them. Countless online sources could help you build an affiliate marketing website, though you might need time to study and learn the whole process. This is one of the reasons why your site or the products you are going to promote must match your interest. Building your marketing website for the first time would be a lot more fun if you know very well the theme of your site. If you don’t have time to make your own website, you can use templates or purchase readily available websites. The latter, however, is a more expensive option.

Creating an affiliate website on your own would be cheaper and more interesting. In the process of building your website, you may also increase your knowledge in Information Technology and the use of computers, softwares and the Internet. As you educate yourself in these fields, you are increasing your advantage against other affiliate marketers. It helps a lot, though, if you already know the basics in web page development like programming languages and graphics softwares because you can make your site extra corporate-looking, more convenient to use or easier to navigate. Furthermore, if you are knowledgeable and skillful in this area, you can already concentrate more on the content of the page rather than the design.

The key to draw visitors to your website is to have high quality content; thus, the next thing you must pay attention to in building your marketing website is this. There may be several other factors that contribute to the success of your affiliate marketing site, but a good content tops the list. This is precisely the reason why users choose to enter your site. They want to get information and so when they don’t find it, they would definitely go elsewhere. Write interesting articles related to your theme as this would make them frequent your site. If you have already looked for affiliate programs that complement your site, add links to the business sites and other very good informative sites. Links contribute to how well you will be listed in major search engines as well. Also, create pages for the products you are endorsing, but don’t just promote the products by putting hyped-up ads. Keep your readers interested by injecting lots of relevant and useful information. This would make them click the link to the business site and buy the product. Remember that no good content means no frequent visitors, no sales and ultimately, no commission.

Make your site simple yet not without a touch of class in order to make it appear more of a business website rather than a personal website. This would be pleasing to the eyes and more interesting to browse. To help you with the design, you can check some successful online stores to get an idea on how you can make your site look better. Make sure you don’t place too many banner ads since these could distract some site users; and thus, instead of clicking your ad, they might just leave your site and look for other interesting websites. After all, banner ads are not the only means of advertising your products. Now your website is complete, submit its URL to major search engines to increase your traffic.

Grow from where you started. Learn about use of keywords for search engine optimization and apply them in your content. Update your site regularly or add new webpages. Make sure to inform your prospects about the latest updates in your site. You can use newsletters to accomplish this. The Internet offers a huge source of information about just anything, make use of it. Continue to educate yourself on how to improve your website and soon you’ll find yourself successful in affiliate marketing.

How About Your Own Affiliate Program?

The importance of keyword density.

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears  on a web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site. Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

here are some simple steps to check the density:

- Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

- Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.

- Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

- When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

- Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

To achieve the best results it is important to have the first 250 words of your copy be  keyword rich.

A good tip is to write your content first, then choose your keywords and/or keyword phrases from the content. Rewrite your content as needed, adding keywords and/or keyword phrases that pertain to the theme of the content. This way, you’ve chosen keywords and/or keyword phrases that are relevant to your content, instead of trying to write content to fit your keywords and/or keyword phrases.

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The importance of search engines to your business.

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

The search engines can play a very important role in the success of your business. They can also provide you with unlimited amounts of free traffic and visitors. Recent studies have shown that the average shopper will go to the search engine and do a search before deciding whether or not they want to make a purchase.

When they perform that search the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present them with ones that match their requests. The matches are ranked so that the most relevant ones come first.

It is also good to keep in mind that your prospective customer will probably only look at the first page of listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking. Statistics show that most people use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else.

When your businesses competing with hundreds if not thousands of other businesses for the top spot it makes it easy to understand why search engines are so important to the success of  your business. It all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the keywords and phrases that you choose that play the most important role when it comes to SEO for the online or offline advertising of your website via the search engines.

As I mentioned earlier, when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find what they are looking for in one of the following ways:

- The first option is they find a site through a search engine.

- Secondly they find a site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.

- Or they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

Thus it’s obvious the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

Now, I hope you understand how important the search engines can be to the success of your business and why you should learn and use a variety of SEO techniques to get your business website to rank well in the popular search engines.

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Smiles and good fortune,
Teresa
teresa@spunsilk.com