Internal Links

Internal links are those between posts, pages and post and pages. These links are all within you website. Their purpose is to help your reader to find more information about the topic that exists on your site.

Internal links are also important for your SEO efforts.

So try to have one or more internal links on each post.

Take action to Be Visible Online.

Until the next time,

Craig Childs
Toronto Ventures LLC
10004 Wurzbach Road, #153
San Antonio, TX 78230
210-595-9304

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

For more Online Marketing Tips. Updated frequently so check back often.

Types of Links

There are three types of links:

• Internal
• External
• Back Links

Internal

These are textual keyword rich links between posts, pages or post and pages.   They are used to help your reader find more information about the topic being read.  Internal links are important for search engine ranking.  So try to have at least one internal link on each post or page.

External

External links are from your site to another site.  If you find another site in your niche that has great information you may want to share that site with your readers.  Create a textual link to that site and then see if that site will link to you (back link).

Back Links

Back links are links from another site to yours.  The easiest way to get back links is to do article marketing.   Social bookmarking is another way to get back links.

Links are important to your search engine ranking, so start building them today.

Take action to Be Visible Online.

Until the next time,

Craig Childs
Toronto Ventures LLC
10004 Wurzbach Road, #153
San Antonio, TX 78230
210-595-9304

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

For more Online Marketing Tips. Updated frequently so check back often.

Software to make your social media time more streamlined

So you are using social media as part of your online marketing plan. Great! But have you found it time consuming to update and respond to multiple people on multiple social media sites? You are not alone.

Most people find social media almost addicting. So they spend more time on it than they planned.

What can you do?

You can find some software that will make it easier and faster for you to update and follow. My current recommendations are Ping.fm and Hootsuite.

Ping.fm will allow you to post to multiple social media sites all at once.

Hootsuite will let you follow Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin at the same time. It will also let you follow your twitter lists. And Hootsuite will let you use Ping.fm.

So what I do is use Hootsuite to see what I need to follow up on and Ping.fm (within Hootsuite) to post to all the sites at once.

And what is best – all free.

For more information on social media social sites.

Take action to Be Visible Online.

Until the next time,

Craig Childs
Toronto Ventures LLC
10004 Wurzbach Road, #153
San Antonio, TX 78230
210-595-9304

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

For more Online Marketing Tips. Updated frequently so check back often.

I am not a lawyer but I am aware of the recent FTC changes that affect all websites.

You need to be aware of them and protect your online business.

I don't want to scare you or give you legal advice but here is a link to a blog by an Internet Lawyer and one of his latest posts. He asks and answers some important questions about this topic.

I recommend you read his post.

FTC FAQs: December 1 Deadline

Take action to Be Visible Online.

Until the next time,

Craig Childs
Toronto Ventures LLC
10004 Wurzbach Road, #153
San Antonio, TX 78230
210-595-9304

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

For more Online Marketing Tips. Updated frequently so check back often.

Your First List – How do you start?

First determine what the goal of the list is. Are you collecting names interested in one of you products or all of your products? Are you collecting names of people interested in the topic of your blog? The goal can be anything you want but be sure it is a smart goal.

How Do You Get People To Sign Up?

You must offer them something that is important enough to them that they will give you their personal information (name and email address commonly). It is not about you but them. So the reason to sign up must be compelling.

Frequently people offer some free gift or low costing product to get people to sign up for their list. No matter what it is remember it must be important to the reader.

Setting Up Your New List

Setting up your first list is easy if you use Aweber. They will help you with each step. Just follow their directions and it is easy.

You must set up at least one follow up response so the new list member will receive something from you right away. Then the frequency of emails is up to you. But I would suggest that you at least have one follow up each month.

Once you have your list set up you must add the sign up form to your blog. Aweber will give you the code and you can just add it to a page or widget. Then test it by signing up yourself and seeing if it works.

Now all you need to do is market your list so people will find it and sign up.

Take action to Be Visible Online.

Until the next time,

Craig Childs
Toronto Ventures LLC
10004 Wurzbach Road, #153
San Antonio, TX 78230
210-595-9304

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

For more Online Marketing Tips. Updated frequently so check back often.

Email Marketing

Why would you want to do email marketing?

There are many reasons an online business would want to start an email marketing campaign:

• It's inexpensive
• It can be very successful
• It's automatic
• It's easy – set it a forget it

But you need to do it correctly or you can run into problems including legal ones. So be sure to use a double optin method from a stable autoresponder company.

I would strongly recommend Aweber as your autoresponder. They require a double optin method and will defend you if accused of spamming using Aweber. That alone is worth the cost.

So sign up for an account with Aweber. They have great support, video help and resources to answer any question you might have.

I will go over what email marketing is in the next post. So for now just know that if you have or plan to have product(s) for sale, you will want to use Aweber and email marketing.

Take action to Be Visible Online.

Until the next time,

Craig Childs
Toronto Ventures LLC
10004 Wurzbach Road, #153
San Antonio, TX 78230
210-595-9304

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

For more Online Marketing Tips. Updated frequently so check back often.

Social Media Social Sites

I recommend that you join the social media movement. But social media can take a lot of time. So I also recommend you limit your social media effort to only three sites. These sites are:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Why Just These Three Sites?

To help market your online business these sites can excel. But you need a plan for each site before you get started.

I will discuss the plan for each site in the next few posts.

So just visit these sites and become familiar with them.

Take action to Be Visible Online.

Until the next time,

Craig Childs
Toronto Ventures LLC
10004 Wurzbach Road, #153
San Antonio, TX 78230
210-595-9304

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

For more Online Marketing Tips. Updated frequently so check back often.

Social Bookmarking

The second type of social media site is the bookmarking site. These sites allow you to bookmark a site and share it with others. Some of the best known bookmarking sites are StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious.

You can use just one or a number of them to bookmark your favorite posts, pages and websites. Once they are bookmarked your choices are public. So your friends can see what you bookmarked.

Plus the site you bookmarked gets a back link.

However, be sure you don't just bookmark your own posts and pages. These sites and people viewing your bookmarks will not appreciate that. Remember this is a social site, so bookmark your favorites by others as well as by yourself.

Take action to Be Visible Online.

Until the next time,

Craig Childs
Toronto Ventures LLC
10004 Wurzbach Road, #153
San Antonio, TX 78230
210-595-9304

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

For more Online Marketing Tips. Updated frequently so check back often.

Social Media

There are two basic types of social media sites. Some are bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious. And others are more communication sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Social Media Social Sites

I recommend that all business bloggers have an account with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Each of these sites are different and can help you market your website, services and products.

One thing I always recommend is not to post only information and links to your site or products. Don't always sell. Share useful information, start a conversation and become involved.

Also remember that the number of followers is not important, it is the quality of the followers that's important.

Social media social sites can drive traffic to your website. But as you come across people who are always just selling their products, be sure you are not one of them.

Take action to Be Visible Online.

Until the next time,

Craig Childs
Toronto Ventures LLC
10004 Wurzbach Road, #153
San Antonio, TX 78230
210-595-9304

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

For more Online Marketing Tips. Updated frequently so check back often.

Pay Per Click?

Pay per click is an advertising mechanism where you set up an ad on a search engine. Every time someone clicks on that ad you owe the search engine what ever you have agreed to pay each time someone clicks on your ad.

The best known Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising system is Google Adwords. But there are many others. You can do a search for PPC in you favorite search engine and find quite a few different systems.

No matter what the system, the basic process is you create an ad and agree to pay them a certain amount of money each time your ad it clicked on.

The Ads

You determine the ad and the link that will be used when someone clicks on it. There a limits in length and depending upon the system there may be other restrictions.

Money

Most systems will allow you to limit your exposure with a daily, weekly or monthly financial limit. This is important to control you expenses. So be sure to set a reasonable limit. Then check the results every day.

Reports

The system should give you some very helpful reports to help determine the best ads, how much you have spent and sometimes how much you have made. You can certainly determine how much you have made from your web stats.

If you are making more money then you are spending on your PPC, you should raise the limit.

If you are losing money stop the campaign, make some changes and then restart it. Again watch it at least daily. Once you have a winning campaign, tweak it to make it better.

Take action to Be Visible Online.

Until the next time,

Craig Childs
Toronto Ventures LLC
10004 Wurzbach Road, #153
San Antonio, TX 78230
210-595-9304

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

For more Online Marketing Tips. Updated frequently so check back often.