Gene Minor's Blog

Copyright © 2009 Titus Hoskins

Next year may just prove to be one of the most challenging times for pursuing online or Internet marketing on the web. It may just be a watershed moment for many marketers struggling to keep abreast of all the different factors which have come into play in recent months. Most of these changes will stem from two main sources for potential upheaval: the first being the New FTC (Federal Trade Commission) Guidelines regarding Testimonials and Endorsements and the second being “ALL” the recent changes within Google.

Actually, we already have the new FTC Guidelines which came into effect on Dec. 1st of 2009, but how these new rules are enforced will play out in the coming year as test-cases are brought to court. Basically, these new rules call for absolute disclosure and full transparency regarding Testimonials and Endorsements when a product or service is being offered for sale. Any business (monetary) relationship between the endorser and the company must be made known to the potential buyer. Obviously for those in online or affiliate marketing this could have a great impact if these new rules are strictly enforced. Just imagine all the website owners and bloggers who slap a few banners or affiliate links on their sites to cover hosting or operating costs… will they now have to disclose all these business arrangements?

For professional affiliate marketers and the companies/products they’re promoting, these new guidelines could cause potential headaches and/or legal ramifications since a general blanket disclaimer on their sites will no longer be suffice. To help solve this problem, many of the major companies are now placing an “affiliate” tag on all their banners and making it obvious a business relationship exists with its affiliates. In addition, many online marketers are placing additional disclaimers, affiliate seals and in other ways making it known certain links are indeed affiliate links and a relationship does exist with the product and/or services being promoted.

With these new guidelines, another big issue is email marketing, one of the major marketing techniques of most online marketers. Will a full disclosure be necessary for every email sales pitch? Savvy web marketers know the key to increased sales is in the “follow-up” and the “cookie-ing” of potential buyers; how will the new Guidelines affect this very effective marketing practice? How all these new rules or guidelines play out will make next year a very interesting one for marketing on the web.

Despite this, perhaps the greatest cause for upheaval in the coming year will be Google. There are countless reasons why Google will be a major game changer in 2010 for online marketing. Ever since Bing and more recently the potential Bing/Yahoo competition, Google has gone into complete overdrive, implementing new changes and debuting new programs like there was no tomorrow.

First, we have Google Caffeine which Google is introducing (full force) early in the new year. Google Caffeine, which is a major overhaul of its search engine, will no doubt cause many a marketer some sleepless nights as the total fall-out becomes evident. Other Google updates in the past (Florida Update comes readily to mind) have wrecked havoc on many top ranking sites, but this time Google is doing things a little different and have even given webmasters a beta version of the new search engine. Still, rightly or wrongly, many online marketers are bracing themselves for the full impact of Caffeine, will it mean smooth sailing or a stomach sickening roller-coaster ride for marketers and webmasters?

Second, we have the introduction of “Real Time” search which will be featured in Google’s SERPs. This will make the social media sites like Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace… much more important. Again, the implications for online marketers could be enormous since many can now reach the first page through a different route. Will it also mean more “Real Time” spam? But more importantly, will it mean a greater marketing opportunity for the online marketer who exploits it?

Third, we are seeing Google moving more and more towards “Visual Search” with the introduction of Google Goggles for mobile phones. Just take a picture and you get the Google results instantly – no typing, just point and click. Just envision countless clueless teenagers or more importantly helpless shoppers suddenly being empowered with knowledge and wisdom. Could do more for education since the invention of the printed word and the info-commercial combined. Talk about scary! But will the implications for web marketing be just as revolutionary and enlightening?

Fourth, Google has made it known through its spokesperson Matt Cutts, that site-loading times will be a ranking factor in the new improved Google. Also, proper and correct page coding will also be more important if you want your site to be at full advantage. Broken links will be a big “No-No”, while linking out to important related sites a big plus. All this is only logical, Google’s main product is and has always been its search results, anything which improves those results and provides a more pleasing experience for the Google user should be front and center. Obviously, one way for Google to stay on top, is to provide the best search results to its users.

Fifth<, in order to please the end-user, Google is also moving more towards "Personalized Search" which will make SEO and ranking in the top spot for your chosen keywords a total nightmare for many professional SEOs and online marketers. If everyone can choose their own top results, isn't SEO more or less, a lame duck? Again, the ramifications of personalized search will further play out in 2010, but will professional marketers like what they see?

Finally, while no one would argue Google is King of the Hill when it comes to online search, will all these new changes strengthen or weaken Google’s grip? Will the combined Bing/Yahoo be able to give this giant some much needed competition? Or will Google’s main competition come from an unlikely source, such as big name multi-national corporations who are moving their operations online. Can these big-name keyworded domains start directly pulling in the majority of the web’s traffic, making all search engines secondary? As people become more web savvy, will they go directly to what they’re looking for on the web, bypassing the search engines altogether – including the mighty Google? Such a scenario could have greater consequences for the affiliate marketer since a direct line to a company’s site or product will obviously mean less sales for the online marketer, who really works in coordination with the search engines, either through organic search or PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising in these same search engines.

Overall, the new FTC Guidelines and recent changes to Google, will make next year one of the most interesting times to be pitching anything online. Throw into this the full effect what a combined Bing/Yahoo might bring to the table, and you have the recipe for a tumultuous white knuckle ride, until the dust finally settles and marketers make adjustments like they always do. Until then, hold on because things will probably get a little hectic for many web marketers before we see the light at the end of the tunnel.

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The author is a full time online affiliate marketer. His livelihood is derived from & depended upon search engine marketing & daily monitoring of targeted keywords, mainly within Google. He runs numerous sites, including: Internet Marketing & Internet Marketing Tools Titus Hoskins 2009. This article may be freely distributed with box.

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Copyright © 2009 Riley West

Affiliate marketers need to have certain things. I consider it important to have a web page where you can put your offers and content.

Then you can just get down to driving traffic to your site, making sales, and earning money.

Still, the beginning affiliate marketer and perhaps even some intermediates, would like it to be low priced and more straightforward than the typical setup.

Take as an example the mass of web pages called Squidoo.

It’s really just another website except for it’s size and variety of content. It’s VERY well known at Google.

Last I heard there were about 900,000 individual pages on this huge website and those pages are called “lenses” by the “Squids.”

Here are 5 good reasons to use Squidoo as an affiliate marketer.

The first reason is your cost for the hosting space. It’s zero.

The second reason is the cost of registering a domain name. It’s zero too!

Squidoo loks good because it’s practically effortless, AND it’s very low cost, especially when compared to the typical cost of hosting and domain at about $100 to $130 per year.

That doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t if your site is making money or if you just have plenty of it. But for affiliates who are just starting and a lot of intermediates too, it’s just perfect.

The third reason, and one of big importance to affiliates, is that it is relatively easy to get indexed by Google for your lens. Really it’s a web page. But Google seems to like them.

If you pick your domain name with a keyword relevant to your sites content, that you can easily rank for, and you put it at the beginning of your domain name, you will be started off really well.

Doing a good job optimizing your page (lens) for your relevant keyword, is the best way to get your site to come up on the search results page in Google. Google page one for almost ANY keyword will result in some kind of traffic.

The fourth reason to go with Squidoo is that you are not alone. There is lots of assistance.

This would have really helped me when I was getting started because it seemed like, for me, everything new wasn’t just new…it seemed wierd…alien even. I didn’t “get it.”

Squdoo helps you in a dozen ways and you can see for yourself by just going there and looking around.

In addition, there is a forum where you can go and ask questions and get answers. Maybe later you can even answer some questions.

The fifth reason to use these pages (lenses) is because they work!

By work I mean that you can make them look like a great web page. You can also get them to have a good bit of traffic. And you can engage in direct sales right there.

If you’d like a landing page, this is it!

And that’s not all. You will learn a lot!

Many of the stumbling blocks a typical newcomer or even intermediate affiliate marketer will run into are completely eliminated by this alternative. The first reason that comes to mind is the FREE domain name and hosting.

Go there, join up and start your first lens. Start fooling around with it. Learn how to do a few of the things you need to get a halfway decent site up. There’s going to be plenty of assistance if you get stuck.

In a week to two weeks you could have an affiliate site up, indexed, and getting traffic.

Watch out because IF you do this, the next thing that will happen is that you will get a sale. A sale that didn’t cost you anything but your time and effort.

Only now you’ll know how to repeat it and increase your income.

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Riley West has been spreading the idea of Simplified Affiliate Marketing for a couple of years. The formula is Webpage + Offer + Traffic = Sales. See this explained simply at Targeted Traffic and, while you are there, don’t miss out on the demonstration of a sure-fire, simplified affiliate marketing plan at One Week Marketing.

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People use Google SEO Company as a search term but in actual fact there is no such type of company in the way that there are Google Adwords Certified Companies who have passed Google Exams. However it is a very popular search term and that is the foundations of a good SEO campaign. The mindset of the people searching is more than likely that they wish to find a company who can get great results for them on Google with it being the biggest and most important search engine for the moment.

The subject of SEO is highly documented on the web and contains plenty of good information but also plenty of mis-information. This leads to it being more difficult to understand for some business owners who let’s face it are busy running their business!

To understand SEO the first step is to think like a search engine. Search engines are continually refining their processes in order to give their customers a better experience. This means that SEO which has been done to try to fool the search engines will sooner or later be no use. For example Google’s evaluation of links has become stricter and will continue to do so.

Think about times when you have searched for something and some of the results were not what you were looking for then you were not as satisfied a search engine customer as you could have been. As a search engine customer you want to find a selection of the most highly relevant websites on your first search without trawling down lots of pages. This is what the search engines want to deliver also.

From an SEO point of view this means that websites should deliver to both search engines customers’ expectations and also to the technical necessities of the search engines. To achieve this requires good old fashioned hard work, technical knowledge and creativity. For websites who wish to achieve important Google SEO rankings a combination of specialist, excellent content on their website and evidence of other good websites giving votes of confidence (links) is what works over time.

Google has no way to check out your shop/website except for the technical messages you give to it and then other reputable websites feeling it is important enough to link to it. Before the internet if someone was to recommend a business they would have physically met the people involved and seen the office or shop. Google and the search engines have to evaluate your business on the votes of others from their websites.

So Google is checking out the company you keep. They won’t penalize you if someone links to your website if they feel they are not reputable, they could however if you link to a website which becomes blacklisted by them. It is important not to get over excited with promises of thousands of links as there is a good chance that they may not translate into much quality.

Another way to look at Google SEO is like a new TV series. See your website as a TV Series that you will release and wish it to be popular. Naturally you will make sure that the production is as good as possible and that you have a cast of talented actors. This is like the onsite optimisation.

Plan your website like a new TV series, you have the big plot and the sub plots. You will want the information to be expert and ideally have something different to offer, but ideas also for future episodes. This means at the beginning of the website you must have all your products/services/keywords covered and plenty of information for a good customer experience. Yet you should have areas of expertise that you can drill down into and expand out into really specific specialist pages.

You know the kind of buzz that has been created by some new TV Series, so if a buzz can be created by your website to some extent on the internet some of the most important SEO work is in place for good Google SEO rankings. If this work is done especially well links will come naturally over time, however building links is one of the most important parts of SEO and a creative, clever link building campaign should go hand in hand with the onsite optimisation.

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Jackie de Burca is co-owner of CWA Europe which is a search marketing agency. CWA Europe specialise in being this type of creative Google SEO company and are also a Google Adwords Certified company.

http://www.cwa-europe.com/search-engine-optimisation/google-seo-company/80-10.html

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As a new website owner, champing at the bit to get visitors, you may be wondering where they all are to begin with. A good web development company will optimise your website generically as a matter of good practice so that the search engines – when they find you – know what your website is about. However, it’s still up to you to tell the internet world that your website is there. When it comes to growing your business or company website and increasing its popularity with the search engines in terms of search engine results placement (SERPs) as well as PageRank (PR) there are several factors that are considered important. You may know what basic search engine optimisation is, and this is the process of improving the quality of traffic to your website.

However, once your website has been optimised onsite with keywords in all the right places, you’ll need to start off-site SEO. This is crucial and necessary to achieving a friendly status with search engines, thus giving you higher and higher search engine results placements (SERPs) so that your customers and visitors will be able to find you. Off-site search engine optimisation (SEO) is necessary; if you don’t use it then you can liken it to trying to grab the search engines’ attention while having one hand tied behind your back. This is how important it is, and there are several ways to go about off-site SEO techniques.

Linkbuilding and Backlinks

The ultimate way to improve your SEO efforts is to increase your linkbuilding campaign. The way this works is by obtaining as many quality backlinks as you can for your website. A backlink is when you have another website that has a link pointing back to your site. This link from the other website is often thought of as a “vote” for your website. This vote signals the search engines, which in turn put your website in a more favourable light, thus pushing you further up in the search engine.

How to Get Backlinks

There are several ways to go about getting backlinks, and in relation to off-site SEO these techniques do take some hard work and dedication.

Article Writing and Submissions – This off-site SEO technique involves writing an informational, attention-grabbing article on a certain topic and submitting it to large article directories. For example, if you’re in the customer service industry then you could write an article on “5 sure-fire ways to make customers like you” or a related title.

The important part about this process is that when you submit articles to article e-zines and article directories then you are allowed to include a link that goes directly to your site. This increases the number of backlinks that you have, especially if you’re writing lots of great articles and submitting them to multiple article e-zines and directories.

Getting backlinks from large article directories is a good strategy to use, but an even better one involves getting a backlink from a website owner that has relevant and similar information as is posted on your site. Relevancy is crucial when it factors into off-site SEO so having a related website, such as from a website owner who owns the same type of business as you, give you a backlink would be powerful search engine food. However, these often require you to post their link on your website in return – a link exchange. For various reasons to do with Page Rank this can work well but ask yourself, do you really want your website’s visitors to be directed elsewhere?

Forum Postings – In forums, you’re routinely allowed to have a forum signature, which can be used to post a link back to your website. The more posts you have, the more backlinks you have. Of course, you want to make sure that you post great and useful information which would boost your authority as well.

All in all, these are only a few of the major techniques that can help with your off-site SEO. As mentioned, all of this takes time and dedication to do, but once you have started and have seen the results for your website then chances are that you’ll only be motivated more to continue with your off-site SEO efforts.

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Andrew Plimmer is CEO of Suncoast Internet, SEO Sunshine Coast, web design and web development specialists. For more information on Internet Marketing go to =>
http://www.suncoastinternet.com.au/

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If you are in business the most important thing you’ll want to do is get traffic to your site. To do this without spending anything on advertising is the ‘holy grail’ of internet marketing. Leanne Griffiths review’s one such program.

By now, you’ve probably heard all about it – I mean, it’s all over the forums, and the Alexa ranking for this site is insane right now.

It is important you compare products and prices becuase you can get ripped off there are many scams out there that do not deliver what they promise.

The Affiliate Code claims to show you step by step via video tutorial how to generate free web traffic. But does it deliver what it promises? I put it to the test and let me tell you I was surprised at the outcome. Let me tell you why.

There are other programs out there that will help you with getting web traffic (either buying web traffic or SEO optimization)which I have purchased and tested but let me say I am no technical wizard by any means and I had to ask for a refund for many due the complexity of the programs and the lack of support or help. (I will refrain from sharing them here as it is not appropriate as this was my own personal experience but I would be happy to talk to anyone directly. Some of the better products out there are 7 Figure Marketing School and Triaffiliates. These also work and are inexpesive ways or getting your business listed organically in google.

So I purchased Michael Jones’s Affiliate Code to report back to my clients on the effectiveness of the program. The program costs between $57-$77 USD (it does have and exit pop up which discounts the price. FYI – The discount you get is $20 which makes this product good value for money.

Now I have to say I was skeptical, I’ve been around and spent a lot of money (some good investments some not so good) on programs like this. For me the best thing about the program is he actually takes you step by step through the training of HOW TO actually generate free traffic to your website.

He tells you WHAT to do, show you HOW to do it and then shows you a live example of implementing this method from start to finish. So for me that was great and it was actually very interesting and he kept me engaged with a little humor thrown in too. (I like talking to people and presenting and writing but start talking about meta tags, back links, SER, SEO and my eyes start glazing over!)

The training is excellent and motivates you to implement it and I did try this technique on one of my websites (I really need help with sales at the time!)

In about 24 hours I had double the amount traffic going my site www.7figmarkschool.com and in 48 hours I had tripled my sales from the same time the week before.

BUT there is a downside folks. My website actually crashed (well my server did) and it took me a day to fix so I lost sales during that period and I am not too happy with that. I did send feedback that they should put a warning on the training video that you must check with your website sever people to ensure it can handle the traffic surge. Talk to your server/website people that within days and weeks you could have massive traffic to the site and ensure the server can handle that. The other benefit of using this program is to generate organic listings for your website. You do not appear in the sponsor ads section which many people who are searching for something ignore anyway.

My tips for ensuring you get the most out of this program:

1. Take your time and DON’T SKIP any of the training – you may think you know but even I learnt a lot going over topics that I thought I know all there was to know. So become a student and learn and take notes during the tutorial.

2. Use the tools he gives you – you can download an excel file which is completely formatted with calculations and analytics that will save you hours and hours of work. Don’t reinvent the wheel!

3. If you don’t’ understand something you can email Michael (the support is fantastic) and he will respond.

4. Try it on your website and ensure you action this. Most importantly is you need to know how it all works so you can show someone else to do this if you decide to outsource and he shows you how to get others to do this to.

In conclusion using Michael Jones’s Affiliate Code will generate free web traffic to your website and it will get you on the front page of Google and Yahoo but you MUST follow my advice above or it will become just another bit of software gathering dust in your office draw!

I hope you’ve found this review helpful and if you have any further questions you can contact me directly

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Leanne is a presenter, mentor and coach and is an experienced network marketer. Her background is executive level with both major airlines in Australia and works for various charities and on boards http://www.leannegriffiths.com
http://www.massmarketmayhem.com

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To benefit from your marketing efforts on a long term basis you need to develop backlinks to your website. There are many ways to do this, but one of the most effective is search engine optimization.

In this article we will look at link building and SEO and why it is a great long term strategy for marketing your business.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, can be define as the process of optimizing a website to get better results in search engines. It is a process because it involves several steps.

The most important thing you can do is target relevant keyword phrases so search engines can determine what you are trying to tell them. Whether you are doing article marketing, blogging, or building web pages, hyperlinking keyword phrases in your marketing efforts are extremely important.

There are many ways you can develop links to your business by using keyword phrases that the search engines like. One example of this would be hyperlinking a keyword phrase in the signature file of your discussion forum profile.

When a search engine sees a hyperlinked phrase leading to a web page optimized around those keywords, it determines this to be relevant and worthy of a searcher seeing. If you do this enough times not only will you get traffic from the discussion forum, but you will begin to rank high on a search engine for that keyword phrase.

This is one of the best ways to get long term traffic using SEO and link building. Most discussion forums archive their threads so you never know when a post you’re making could bring you traffic for many years to come.

The same thing is definitely true with article marketing. You can hyperlink keyword phrases in the resource box of your article and benefit from traffic from that article for a long time.

You can also target specific keyword phrases in the article itself. When you do this you are using proper search engine optimization and this can lead to potential back links and traffic that way.

Blogging is a great way to build backlinks and optimize your articles for search engines. Today many bloggers will target longtail keyword phrases in the title and in the body of their blog post.

Many search engines look specifically to blogs for fresh content for their searchers to view. This is a great opportunity for you to rank highly with the search engines and at the same time get traffic from your blog.

These are all ideas on why SEO and link building is the best long term marketing strategy. Any link you are getting back to your website, that benefits you long after you have gotten it, is an excellent long term strategy for advertising your Internet business.

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Suzanne Morrison is the owner of a higher search engine ranking website that show average people how to achieve higher rankings in here SEO eBook. Visit it here today to see how she can help you!

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Copyright © 2009 Riley West

Currently, I run some Google ppc adwords campaigns for customers of mine and they do well enough at it to stay with it.

But I just love FREE TRAFFIC for my sites. But not just any old traffic. I need traffic coming to my sales pages that are interested in buying what I am offering. Targeted traffic as it is often called.

And I love the concept of free traffic and especially free, quality traffic. When I make a sale my profit (commission) is 96 to 98% all mine. I don’t have to send out a check for the traffic as in Adwords.

Let’s take a look at my three most important, and best, ways of getting good traffic to come to my sites.

They are article marketing and keyword ranking for my site that are BOTH accomplished every time I write an article. There is NO article you can lose money or position on. They ONLY improve you.

I use my article to establish rapport and to get the reader to feel inclined to click my links at the bottom of the page in what’s known as a resource box.

But get this…this is killer.

I have a list of keywords that I picked especially for their ease in ranking for. I am currently on Google Page One for several of my keywords and they send me steady traffic. Page one on Google causes traffic! But that’s not all.

Every time I make the links in my resource box I make them like this….Find out more about “free targeted traffic” (where the quote marks frame my link words – anchor text) and that is automatically registered by Google as a one way link to my site that is named “free targeted traffic.”

Now my site moves up on the page for that exact keyword. After you do this for a while you are on page one for a bunch of them and you have targeted traffic coming to your offer! And not as a result of the article being a good traffic supplier but as a result of Google seeing your new one way link and it’s anchor text name.

That’s it folks it’s a twofer big time. Two streams of traffic for one small effort.

I have a couple of ’secrets” here. Secrets are something you don’t know..yet.

Here it is. I have a method for finding the keywords that will get me well ranked in the shortest possible time.

Here’s the other “secret.”. I submit my articles to a mass submission outfit that gets my article out to thousands of publishers. Get it. MASS submission.

Massive traffic. Massive amounts of one way anchor text links and I’m starting to MASS up some money.

Remember this on your quest for a way to make money online. This one thing.

Money = Offer + Traffic… or… Offer + Traffic = Money. It is expressed in some other ways, too. Most people would agree that it’s the traffic that is hardest to get. But it’s not hard after you have been at what I am doing for the last few months. This is getting big.

This is the only actually simple method of making money online that I know of. And you can do it too.

Get Started and Never Give Up!

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Come over an take a look to see what I’m doing at my blog Making An Internet Marketer just working from home and you can easily get started making money online of your own all the while keeping it simple! Plus, don’t miss out on the FREE offer on my email e-course sign up form!

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To Build links is important for website rankings, but building links is not the easiest thing to accomplish. When people get to know you hopefully they will want to link to your site. To help them along, give them some content they can’t resist.

Inbound Links

A website is your place in cyberspace. When people learn how great you and your products are, they can let others know about you. Linking to your website is one way to do that. It is also called a backlink. It is a link to your site on their website or blog.

There are two kinds of inbound links: reciprocal links and organic links. Reciprocal links are those that you get when you agree to swap links with another site. It could be a friend who wants to help you out and vice versa. Getting links like this is okay but not the best when it comes to moving up in the ranks. You have to look at the quality of the sites that you are linking with. They may offer to swap links but if the site is not optimized, reputable and/or well-presented it can backfire. You can be marked down for poor link building. And paying for links isn’t much better. After you have worked so hard on your site, you don’t want it to go to waste like that.

Organic links come from those who are not asked to link to you. They have heard about you (through your stellar marketing campaign) and want to let others know something awesome is in their midst. These links are rated higher by search engines. When you are just getting started it is hard to get links like this.

How do you get the links you need and want?

- Use your content to build links. Writing content that is optimized for keywords in your niche can rank high. Others will click on you first. Sites within your niche that are trying for those higher spots will check you out to see why they can’t knock you off the top.

- Establish expert status. Post content to article directories. Write for other blogs. Being found in other places increases your visibility and adds to your credibility. Everyone wants to be associated with an expert.

- Comment on blogs within your target market. Go to where your potential customers are. Give sound advice and add a link to your website. Pretty soon these people may become loyal readers who will link from their blogs to your website.

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Learn More About Link Building By Visiting http://www.easycash4life.com Arthor: Annette Lode

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