There are a lot of automated blogging software programs out there. The idea behind them is that you push start, and then they send spiders out through the web, trolling for content that matches specific keywords you put into the program. Then they take the content they find and put it on your site. You get to enjoy the advantages from having a site full of content that gets updated quickly without having to go through the work of practically creating the content yourself. It seems like a dream come true. Except…

It appears as if Google is gearing up for a significant cracking down on all those sites that are not filled with original content. They are adding measures in place that will enable them to check on your site’s content to make sure that it has not shown up somewhere else first. If the blog you are operating has mostly copied content material, you could be in for some real trouble. At the very minimum you will lose credibility in the eyes of Google. So what happens to the folks who want to create an automated business?

This primarily means that the business owners and creators around are going to have to learn how to really work hard or find the money to pay others to work hard for them. This is great, since it helps to guard the select few who have done the hard work that goes into generating original content. It also can help to be sure that a person is running a serious business. If you are not good at crafting or creating content, it is advisable to find the money to pay someone to create it for you. Trust us when we say that the expenditure will be really worth it.

The real truth of the matter is that on the Internet, there are lots of blogs that are made upon the hard work of others. The sites then generate income by employing that plagiarized content and placing lots of ads on every page. This is usually an easy method to earn some extra money, but if you get caught you can be sure that the trouble will be a lot. Stealing written content is kind of an enormous deal in the end. Students almost everywhere will get expelled from school for failing to correctly cite a reference. Think about what type of trouble you may be in if you do not credit your source correctly, or if you go so far as to steal another person’s intellectual property. Won’t it basically be simpler just to compose your own work?

The simple fact is that if you really want to earn money, you have to put in some work. Google is trying to reward the people who are doing that hard work while punishing the people who are stepping on the backs of the hard workers. This is a good thing. It helps to even out the playing field between the people who are genuinely trying to help others and earn a place for themselves online and those who only want to make a quick buck.

Therefore, when considering any automated blogging software program, think carefully about it, given that web people should actually be ready now to do some serious and hard work. Google is certainly trying to find a reason to take down individuals who are not willing to do real work!

You may have heard of Elance, but you may be unsure about whether or not to use it, because you might not have found an unbiased Elance review yet. Well, Elance is like a virtual warehouse of freelance and independent contractors. You can find contractors living around the world with expertise in a myriad of skills, like graphic design, writing, programming and even administrative help.  However, what you really want to know is: Is Elance as good as it seems?

Buyers And Elance

If you are looking for someone to do some work, Elance is a buyer’s market. The entire site is built to cater to the person buying the services. All the services for the buyer are free. You only pay your contractor for the work they do, and at the price the two of you agree upon ahead of time. You can create your account and post the details of your first job in a matter of minutes. It is not difficult to sign up. As pointed out in most reviews, Elance is a smart site. It realizes that getting the buyer to sign up quickly is crucial to its success. After all, without someone willing to fork over some money, the site is useless.  

You can have your project request online in moments. Do slow down and read over the options on your project though. You want to be sure you have all the info up that you need. Otherwise, you are just opening yourself to contractors who will low ball their bids, but their work will be sub par. Any site that functions such as Elance has this drawback. You will get bidders who lack the skills you really want. Contractors must only have the money to pay their fees to have an account on Elance and bid on jobs.

You must weed through the numerous bids you may get from low quality contractors, who will bid low on your job. You really should interview prospective contractors. Ask them for work samples reflective of their skill level. You should also have checkpoints along the way so you do not get a nasty surprise at deadline time.

How About The Providers

There is an astonishing number of providers or contractors on Elance. So culling out the quality workers can be very difficult as most Elance review writers will probably tell you. The biggest thing holding Elance back are the massive numbers of mediocre providers with accounts. You cannot simply hire the lowest bid that comes in. The old adage about getting what you pay for certainly applies here. Do not expect to get high quality work for low wages. You will be hard-pressed to find someone quality for low wages. If you can simply expand your budget, you can draw providers with tremendous skill and ability. You can check out their scores and interview them to find a good fit. Each provider gets feedback for every job they do. You can track how much they have earned on the site as well as how many people have come back to hire them again.

Tools On Elance For Workroom

When you read an early Elance review, you will find that people applauded when Elance came onto the scene. They felt that its escrow system and reviews worked well. It was an early website of its kind and that definitely helped the site’s reviews. It is the contractor or provider who ultimately pays the fees. Elance receives its fees as soon as you submit payment through the site to the provider. There is a virtual workroom on Elance that allows you track how many hours the provider spent on your job. Right now, Elance is on the heels of Odesk in terms of their workroom hour tracking. However, they lack mobile apps and desktop tracking, like their competitor, Odesk.

Elance offers many options for invoices and payments. Still, in many reports quite a few Elance review writers show complains about the confusion these options cause. Thus, once the job is done, it can get very confusing. As a result, Elance is trying to upgrade and test their features. This means there is frequent tweaking of Elance systems and operations. Sometimes these tweaks are small. Other times, they should be called an overhaul. The entire system will look different. This can be difficult to understand to users as well. You will be hard-pressed for customer service. Documentation is also hard to come by.

The Final Word

Like most things, Elance has positives and negatives. An honest Elance review will tell you that there are enough good points about Elance to drive you to this site again and again for outsourcing. It is the largest site of its kind, with the most providers of anyone out there. There is also a tremendous network, unlike any other. Buyers can use Elance for free and instantly have access to the best in global providers.  Sometimes the site is confusing, and it can be hard to swim through the throngs of low quality, low balling bids from providers. This can be a problem. Additionally, often it is difficult to discern a provider’s location. This can be crucial information in certain fields and deadlines.

However, all that aside, Elance can be a tremendous help to you. You can split up your workload so you can live your life. Resist relying too heavily on outsourcing though. You still need to keep your thumb on the projects. Be sure to interview works carefully and proofread their work. Take advantage of ratings, feedback and samples so you can make the best pick possible.

One very important factor in website optimization that is often overlooked is title tags. This is the code for your page in the “head” section. Many website owners make the mistake of just using their company name on every page of their side for the title tags. Since the search engines use the title and keywords in your content, you are losing out on the chance for increased rankings.

Importance of Keywords

Before you begin building your website, you should select three or four primary keywords. There are a number of free keyword research tools available to help you find the appropriate keywords for your niche, and it is recommended that you take advantage of them to be certain that the keywords you use will work for you.

What Should  My Title Tag Include

This is where many people get lazy, and it is costing them, whether they realize it or not. By just putting your company name, it will be harder for the search engines as well as internet surfers to find you, unless you are already well known, like YouTube.com.

For the smaller business owner, it is recommended that you put your name, your city, and 2 or 3 of your primary keywords. For example, if you own Tom’s Marketing Company, “tom’s marketing SEO consulting,” would be far better than “toms marketing company.” This lets people know that you are a marketing company, and you also do SEO consulting. “Tom’s Marketing Company,” has no emphasis on what type of marketing you in fact do. You could even add your city of state, “Tom’s marketing SEO consulting California.”

You should limit your title tag to no more than 65 characters since that is the limit that most search engines will display, so avoid any unnecessary words that just waste space.

Title tag mistakes

There are five major mistakes that people make that cost them increased search engine rankings.

1. Having no title. It may sound a bit odd, but there are many sites that do not have a title. This is important as it tells the search engines what keywords to list you under.

2. Just using your company name. Unless you are well known, who the heck are you among the millions of other small business owners and marketers?

3. Using your company name on every page. You may think that having your company name on every page is helping, but in fact, many of the the search engines penalize websites that do this. Using different tags for each page will get you listed in the search engines for several keywords. In addition, it makes your page content relevant to those particular keywords for better rankings.

4. Saving file’s names incorrectly. When saving a file name, instead of saving it as the date, or your own personal method of saving files, consider using one of your keywords. Example:  Instead of saving a file as “010309.Jones,” saves it as “seminar.Jones.” If you conduct seminars, you would be using one of your primary keywords.

5. Hyperlinks. When most people put hyperlinks on their page, the use things like “Click here,” or “Read More.” Try using a keyword as a hyperlink instead, i.e. “Next SEO Conference.” Utilizing keywords helps increase your page in the search engine rankings.

These suggestions are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to search engine optimization, however, making a few simple changes in your title tags will prove to be beneficial to your online business.

If you think that social networks like MySpace and Facebook are just for teens, think again. Internet marketers, blogger, and webmasters are creating profiles on social networking sites in order to increase web traffic to their site, share news and make connections.

These social network sites are fantastic because they provide connections with “friends” across the world. What is the benefit to your business? You get to “meet” other business owners in your niche market as well as potential customers who are interested in what you have to sell.

Social networks are popular among individuals, marketers, musical groups and television stations. This allows people, who otherwise would never have connected, to interact with each other. In fact, millions of people log onto social networking sites each day.

As an Internet marketer, you will want to take advantage of these high profile sites by joining, creating a page, and using status updates about your business. Every time you update your status, people who have joined your network of friends will get that update.

Although you cannot place ads on your page, you may provide a direct link to your website and broadcast e-mails to your friends and followers. You can also mention your business in your profile and create and join groups of like-minded people.

For instance, let’s say that you are a business coach, and you want to increase your visibility and brand awareness. You can create a group called “Entrepreneurs in Action.” Once you create this group, others can join your group or become a fan of your group.

Once you have established the group, start talking. Bring up issues that are relevant to the group members. Interact with members. Establish your credibility by positioning yourself as an authority. As you interact with the community, you are increasing brand awareness for your product or service.
One of the major benefits of joining social networks is that they rank high on search engines. With a worldwide audience at your disposal, you can reach out to people across the globe.

The interactivity makes social networking sites very popular. Interactive applications allow you to make fun connections and play games with your friends. Include your link, an RSS feed and update the information to your site frequently to drive traffic to your site. You should also use the comment sections to increase awareness about your business.

Although there are literally hundreds of social networking sites, here are some of the most favored ones: Facebook, Flixster, Myspace, Ryze, Bebo, weebly, friendfeed, LinkedIn, Classmates, del.icio.us, YouTube.

Other sites, such as Twitter, allow you to post continuous updates that others can see. You can tell them about your latest project, send links to your followers and engage in casual interactions with other Twitter users.

The reason why people get addicted to these social networks is that they can feel like they are part of the action. Frequent updates, as small as they may seem, keep followers coming back for more.

If you haven’t joined a social networking site, you are losing the opportunity to network with millions of people worldwide. Experienced marketers know the unlimited income potential of the social networks’ phenomenon as well as to use these sites as a great tool to increase their web traffic.

Nowadays, almost everyone is trying to do everything on a budget – grocery shopping, traveling, major purchases and even internet marketing. Putting up a website is easy – it doesn’t take a whole lot of money and with Web 2.0 platforms, you could do it yourself, even if you are not that technical. Promoting your website takes a little more work, but follow some website promotion ideas, and you will see that it can be done successfully on a budget. Unless you have a nice nest egg, saving money is important and reaching your target audience with minimal out of pocket costs is just what most internet marketers are looking for in today’s economy.

Some people have a knack for internet marketing, and others need a little help along the way. Patience and persistence are the key factors to success with internet marketing. It is not a business that blows up overnight, instead it builds gradually until one day you realize that you have a steady stream of income, and you have made it. Knowing how to advertise and reach your audience should be your main focus once you have your website up and running. Remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time around, and you can always make changes.

You just have to get out there and get your feet wet – stay in shallow waters until you are ready to dive in with the big fish, and believe me, there are plenty of them. You will have a lot of time to compete, but for now, let’s just focus on some website promotion ideas.

Search engine submissions and rankings are two critical parts of promoting your website. If the search engines don’t find your websites valuable, the search engine spiders won’t crawl them and if your sites don’t get crawled, you won’t get ranked. So first you must focus on your website submissions.

There are literally hundreds of search engines where you can submit your website. It is recommended that you stick with the most popular ones – Google, Yahoo, MSN/bing, but don’t forget about the others. There are two ways you can submit your website: manually and automatically. Naturally, manual submission takes more time since you have to submit to each of the search engines individually. If you are really serious about getting started, investing in software that will automatically submit your website to a number of search engines is a wise move. This will save you a significant amount of time and for less than 50 bucks, you can get your site submitted to over 640 directories just by filling out one form. You can do the math on that one.

Getting Your Website Ranked

No one really understands the algorithm of the search engines. They have a special formula that they use to determine the position in which websites are ranked. Some of the things that they use to determine this positioning are the number of links your website has (other websites, which are linked to your website), the quality of content, and the overall appearance of your website. The number of links seems to hold a lot of weight with the search engines as well as the quality of the content. This content can be in the form of articles, audio or video, so why not get that camcorder out and start filming some quality content.

Banner, classified ads and text links are inexpensive ways to increase your traffic and get your website noticed. Press releases are another way in addition to article marketing with a resource box linking back to your website.

As you can see, there are a number of ideas that you can promote your website, even if you don’t have a lot of money. There are many effective low-budget marketing strategies that have proven to work so try one or two – or try them all. In time, you will start to see increased traffic and hopefully increased sales.

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be a priceless tool for your online business, but before you can get the most benefit of this tool, you must understand how to interpret the web traffic analysis data.

Many web hosting companies only provide you with the basics when it comes to web traffic analysis data. It is then up to you to utilize this information to the best of your ability. This web traffic analysis that you do receive from your web hosting company can be a bit overwhelming if you do not understand how to apply it to your online business, so let’s go over some of the information you may receive, so that you will understand how to use it. The basic data that you will receive will be visits to your site. These visits can be tracked daily, weekly and/or monthly.

The purpose of these figures is to measure your website’s activity accurately. At first glance, it may appear that the more traffic you see the better. In fact, most people assume that their website is doing well from viewing these figures, however, this perception is inaccurate. By seeing what your visitors are searching for, you can accurately measure your website’s activity, but disregard the first glance since it is not accurate if we speak about analising your web traffic.

“Hits” Don’t Matter

There is a myth or a misconception about what is known as “hits” and what is quality web traffic to your site. Hits are simply the number of information received by your server. If you think about it, a hit is simply a number of graphics per page. This is to give you an idea of how inaccurate the “hits” concept can be. One good example is if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server notes this as 15 hits when in fact it is really only one visitor checking out one page. It is for this reason that “hits” are not very useful when you do a web traffic analysis of your website.

The goal is using a web traffic analysis to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working. One way to figure this out is to see how long visitors are spending on your site. If the time spent is relatively short, there is a problem. It could be your website appearance or your content. It is up to you to figure out and fix those problems.

Importance of Keywords

In addition, web traffic analysis stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, now take a look at your keywords and keyword phrases. If certain keywords are sending visitors to your site; the more targeted the visitor, i.e. they find what they are looking for on your site, or even better, if they  fill out your contact form or make a purchase, then you know that the particular keyword(s) is valuable.

Keywords are crucial to attracting quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Careful analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you an understanding of your visitor’s needs and motivations.

If you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, that is great news, and it means you have achieved an important level of brand recognition, which is a promising sign. As a result, always look at your web traffic analysis stats the right way and your site will be on track for success.

If you want to become number one in your niche market, it is paramount to increase web traffic to your site, to create brand recognition and to build authority. If you want to brand yourself in specific markets, there are five steps you can take to be the go-to person in your niche market.

1. Create content for the search engines

By creating good content laden with SEO keywords, you can brand yourself as an authority in your target market. You can start by searching for other businesses in your niche. Pay close attention to the keywords that they are using over and over again. If you see the same keywords on the first page, you know that these words are working. Use the same keywords in your website content to optimize your website, what will in return increase your web traffic and establish yourself as an authority.

2. Write feature articles

Feature articles are great for establishing authority in your target market. Write short articles that give value to your prospects. For instance, you can give tips to succeed in the marketplace, or you simply define certain procedures and processes that your prospects need to know. Short, focused articles can be posted on your blog, submitted to online article directories or submitted to AboutUs.org. It is important to give away free information in your niche market in order to establish yourself as an authority. People follow authorities, and the more exposure you can get, the better, resulting in an increase of your web traffic.

3. Send your content to as many sites as possible

Write to webmasters and ask if you can be a guest author on their website. Include a bio box after your article with a link to your website. If people like what you have to say, they will click on your link to get more information about who you are and your business. Focus on branding your name so it becomes widely recognizable.

4. Do interviews

If you can get an interview with an expert in your niche market, it is gold, especially if it’s a high profile interview. Post the interview on your site or use it as a giveaway in one of your promotions. Don’t forget to post it on YouTube to increase your visibility. You should also grant interviews to other marketers to position yourself as an authority. Be sure to get rights to use the interview on your website, social networking sites and on YouTube.

5. Participate in social networking sites

Social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace have a worldwide audience, and this is a great opportunity to blog about your business, your products or the services you offer. Because social networking sites post updates to your friends or followers, they will have immediate access to the latest information you have to offer. Twitter is another great resource to keep your followers up-to-date about the latest developments in your business. The updates are short and to the point, and you can post your website URLs for immediate exposure and brand recognition. This all will clearly help you increase web traffic.

To increase web traffic to your website is a matter of establishing yourself as an authority in your target market. Follow market trends, take note of what the heavy hitters are doing and above all, do what they are doing but do it better.

Have you ever experienced this scenario? You spend hours, days, and weeks (maybe months) working on your website and product creation. You might be starting simple with a blog, or you may have a product package to sell. You just know that what you have to offer is so great that the question how to get traffic to your  blog or site will be no problem, right? Not necessarily. Creating a website is only part of the equation. Getting noticed takes a little work.

The first step to getting noticed is to create fresh, original content on your site regularly. For most websites, this could be once or week or several times a week depending on your market. You’ll want to keep the information useful to your target market, so make it helpful. It is also wise to close blog entries with a teaser about the next blog to keep readers coming back for more.

While the best copy is conversation and speaks directly to the reader, don’t underestimate the value of hiring a proofreader. Too many websites and blogs these days are riddled with spelling, punctuation and grammar errors. If you don’t care enough to produce quality content, what does that say to your readers? Your website is the face of your business and if the world sees a sloppy site, visitors won’t see you as a professional. While you don’t have to have an English-teacher-ready copy, the conversational tone and style should reflect a tone of professionalism.

Next, you’ll want to optimize your copy. Use keywords in your copy that are related to your topic. Google’s free Keyword Tool can help you determine a list of relevant keywords. Search engines like original, quality copy surrounding the keywords. Don’t be tempted to use keywords in a list or to haphazardly place the words in the copy. It should read smoothly. For best results, add the keyword or keyword phrase to the title, to the first paragraph, and to the last paragraph. You should also add a few keywords in the body of the copy, preferable in the first third of it.

You can link to other high-quality websites. Consider exchanging links with other webmasters. These are called backlinks. Backlinks are, essentially, your hyperlinks on other websites. When clicked, these links point back to you site. The more backlinks that you have, the higher you’ll rank in the search engines. Sources like Digg.com and EzineArticles.com are great resources you can use to create backlinks.

If you choose to post on Digg or EzineArticles, you’ll want to create quality content that you can post on those sites. This is called article marketing. You can either write the articles yourself, or you can outsource the work. The more articles you post, the more traffic you can drive to your blog or website. Articles on these sites – and others -always include a bio box about the author as well as links that point to the author’s websites.

Even though your blog or website may be new, you can still get noticed if you follow some of the strategies above. Fresh, keyword-rich content is paramount to getting noticed by the search engines. If you work on your website consistently, post your links on other high-ranking websites and create keyword-rich, high quality articles, your website will climb in rank in the search engines, hence it solves the question “how to get traffic to your blog or new website”.

So you have got some old content that you never used and half a dozen PLR packages that you never even opened, just laying around taking up space on your hard drive. Maybe you are frustrated you bought the content and never used it, or feeling silly that you even bought that 27-niche super-discount pack of PLR articles. Well, it’s time to increase traffic to your blog by turning this random content into targeted content.

And it’s time to quit feeling bad. Because you can put this content to work and turn it into targeted content – and you don’t even have to buy hosting or a domain name!

How?

First, go to the Google external keyword tool. Google it if you don’t have it bookmarked already. Under “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” click “Website Content”.

If you do not have your content up on a website just yet, don’t fret. Just click the sentence that says “Or, enter your own text in the box below.”  Then, copy and paste your text.

Now, just click the “Get Keyword Ideas” button. Instant keyword research!

(After you see your results, you might want to go back and click the “filter my results” text. It’s very possible you will get some results that you don’t have any use for. Even with the filter, some of your results might not be worth much. However, it’s likely that some will.)

Now you are ready to post your content – on someone else’s site!

The sites I am talking about are Web 2.0 sites. So technically, they are your sites – yours and everybody else’s! The sites themselves may be communal, the pages you make will be yours.

Do a little bit of research on what kinds of products are selling with those keywords. This isn’t too hard. Just take the keywords that had any search volume at all and search for them in Google. The keywords that bring up Adwords ads on the right side of the page are the ones you want. Find out what products those people are selling.

Make a Squidoo page, a Hubpages page, whatever you want. Remake your title to target whatever keyword goes with the best money-maker. This doesn’t have to be a product – you can make a lot of money doing leads as well. Now, tag your page with the term AND with the more valuable related keywords that Google showed you. Now ping your tag pages.

If you want, you can also Stumble or Digg your new page, submit it to directories, point other lenses or Web 2.0 pages at it – or just tag, ping and leave it there. More effort will always give you better results. However, even if you don’t feel like putting much effort into it, you have still put some pages up that have your money-making links on them. And your targeted content will increase traffic to your blog and do more for you on these pages than it will just by sitting on your hard drive!

Getting targeted traffic to your site is easy if you know how to do it. One very effective strategy is to use backlinks.

Backlinks are your website links that are displayed on another website. These links literally point back to your site from the host site. If the host site has a high ranking in search engines, you will get more traffic from the exposure.

Using backlinks makes good business sense, and there are different approaches you can take to increase your site’s ranking in search engines and draw loads of traffic to your site.

1. Post in forums and message boards

Participate in niche-related forums and message boards to bring traffic to your website. Most forums allow you to post your link in your signature line, and curious posters will click on your link to check out your site. The higher the site’s ranking, the more visible your site will be.

2. Leverage article marketing

Article marketing is another great way to get visibility for your site. Post in as many article directories as possible. At the bottom of your article will be a biography box where you will describe your business and add your website link. As website owners and bloggers link to your article, your rankings improve. The key is to write newsworthy and relevant content so that others will want to link your articles to their websites.

3. Participate in social networking sites

Create profiles in Facebook and MySpace. These social networking sites have worldwide audiences, and they rank high in search engines.

4. Exchange links with another website owner

This is where you exchange links with another website owner. It is a reciprocal agreement that creates a win-win situation for both of you. Do a web search to find other sites with high rankings and ask the site owner if he is willing to trade links with you.

5. Be a guest blogger

Approach website owners in your niche market and ask them if you can submit a free article or blog to their websites. You will add fresh content to their site, and you can include a short bio and link to your site at the end of the article.

6. Purchase backlinks

This is a sticky issue because some people question whether buying backlinks is ethical; however, it is common practice among Internet marketers. When you purchase backlinks from a broker, your site’s link will show up on other sites – multiple sites – which will increase your search engine rankings.

7. Practice strength in numbers

In order to have a significant impact, you should have backlinks on as many sites as possible. There is strength in numbers, and the more backlinks you have the higher your site will rank in the search engines.

Driving targeted traffic to your site is easy if you are willing to spend a little time and effort to take advantage of all the tools Web 2.0 has to offer. The more backlinks you have, the higher your search engine rank, and the more traffic you will get on your website.