Make Money With A Home Business Create Wealth With Your Online Business provided by Bravenet.com

Trade Secrets of Six Incredibly Successful Online Entrepreneurs!

Add Content To Your Site Everyday

If you have been a webmaster for more than a week, you've surely heard the saying "Content Is King." And it really is true! This article will explain why the regular addition of fresh content to your website is so crucial and explain several ways to do it easily and inexpensively (even free).

Why Adding Fresh Content Regularly Is So Important

Adding new content to your website on a regular basis is the key to your online success for several reasons:

1 - The search engine spiders LOVE to crawl new pages. There is intense competition in the quest to be considered "the best" overall search engine, and the total quantity of pages in their index is an important bragging right for the winner. Believe me, if you'll invest the time required to add new high-quality informational articles to your website on a regular basis, Google and the other search engines will reward you very well for it!

2 - Adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis (every day, if possible) keeps Google's spider "interested" in your site. Once it realizes that you add at least one new page every day, it will visit your site and crawl your pages more frequently. Your new pages will get crawled, indexed and begin showing up in searches in days instead of weeks!

3 - More quality content is good for attracting more visitors to your website. Why? It's a numbers game - if your site has 1,000 pages indexed in the search engines, that means there are 1,000 "roads" to your site from the search results. Your site will have a greater chance of being "found" on the search engines for a whole slew of search terms than if you had only, say, 50 pages. Note that I said QUALITY content. Don't just put up junk - believe me, the search engines and your visitors alike will hate junk.

4 - More content attracts more one-way inbound links, which in turn boosts your search engine rankings. Gaining lots of links to lots of pages will help boost the status of your website in the "eyes" of Google, Yahoo, etc. and your pages will rank higher for their search terms.

So how do I go about continuously adding new content to my website? There are many easy ways to add great quality content to your site, even on a daily basis. Here are just a few that work very well for me:

1 - Write articles. Simply do a Google search on topics related to your website's theme, read the information you find, then write an article about what you have read. DO NOT copy another site's articles without the owner's express permission. Doing so is "copyright infringement," and it will cause you more trouble than you can even imagine! Simple 4-step process: Search > Read > Understand > Write!

2 - Hire others to write articles for you if you don't have the time, ability or desire to write them yourself. College students are often more than capable and willing to write great articles for $10 - $15 a pop. Check with your local community college or post an ad in the classified section of your local newspaper.

3 - Solicit article submissions from other webmasters in exchange for a link back to their sites. Reprinting interesting articles is a tradition in the publishing industry, and if you do it the right way it can work for you too. The key is avoiding a duplicate content penalty from the search engines by having a significant amount of other text on the page in addition to the article text. Navigation links, header and footer information, etc. all help make a page
different from others on the web.

4 - Visit the many "Free Content" websites that are easily found on the Internet. There are literally thousands of great articles already written that are free for the taking in exchange for a simple link back to the author's website (usually in a 4 or 5 line "resource box" tacked on to the end of the article). Simply do a Google search for "free content."

Important: Observe the "no junk" rule stated above. You want your website to be seen as an asset to the web, not an eyesore. Besides, it does no good whatsoever to get visitors to your site just to have them hit the Back button once they see the page!

Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE Directory & Informational Resources http://www.rlrouse.com, your one-stop resource for interesting and useful information on virtually any topic.

Case Study #1

HearandPlay.com


Owner:	Jermaine Griggs
Launched:	November 2000
Traffic:	40,000 unique visitors a month
Revenue:	$200,000 last year; projecting sales of $400,000 this year
Target Market:	Musicians who want to learn how to play the piano by ear
Product/Services Offered:	A 300-page piano course and its accompanying software is the main product, but Jermaine also offers more than 60 free courses on the site

Strategies You Can Apply to Your Business

HearandPlay.com is a perfect example of how to profit from a niche you're passionate about! Jermaine has studied everything he could get his hands on and adopted the winning techniques of successful sites. If you have a service business, sell information, or want to boost your subscription rates, here are some fantastic strategies you can start using right away.

"Help people, don't sell people":

Once Jermaine realized that his visitors were looking for information and were not necessarily ready to buy right away, he focused on creating credibility and offering tons of value, through free courses, e-mail newsletters, and other "sticky" features, like discussion boards and regular chat sessions. By offering this wealth of free information, Jermaine earns the trust of his subscribers and makes them feel comfortable buying from him.

Keep in touch with your visitors:

Sending out free courses as daily e-mails over the space of a week or more is a great way of keeping in touch with your visitors and building a relationship. If you have any information that lends itself to a daily or weekly "lesson," experiment with offering it to your existing subscribers and new visitors. By using this technique, Jermaine turns 60% of his subscibers into paying customers! Plus, because he offers such valuable information, he has an opt-out rate of less than 1%!

Capture more information by offering more value:

Jermaine's two-step process collects names and e-mails for his general newsletter, and then much more detailed demographic information from the 70% of subscribers who request a specific lesson. This is a smart approach, since a one-step form asking tons of questions would likely scare away most visitors, leaving him empty-handed. By offering extra value (the newsletter lessons), he can also ask for extra information.

Armed with these details — ranging from his visitors' goals to their music experience — Jermaine can customize his messages to them, understand his customer demographics, and create new products that fit their needs.

Track everything that moves:

Jermaine manages to squeeze great value out of his $1,500 a month marketing budget, thanks to his ability to track the value of every single click, ad campaign, and visitor using special software. If a specific key word or web site is underperforming, he can pull it right away (or tweak it to boost value). By not relying on instinct alone, he's making the most of every penny.

Don't be shy:

Jermaine reports an explosive growth in sales once he switched from simply listing the features of his course to providing a full-length sales letter — presented as a course — and asking for the sale. Plus, his subscription rates jumped nearly ten times previous levels once he introduced strategic pop-ups to encourage visitors to sign up for one of his newsletters.

Automate everything!

Jermaine has done a remarkable job automating nearly every aspect of his business using various third-party services. While he admits to some frustrating times when one of them doesn't work, it is a very inexpensive way to incorporate some extremely powerful tools. Except for the final shipping of the courses (which could also be outsourced to a fulfillment house), HearandPlay.com could double its sales with very little change in overhead.