The internet opens a big opportunity for both online and offline businesses. Through it, you can reach more people and increase your businesses’ popularity and sales. This is why many businesses are allotting some of their marketing and advertising budgets in building corporate websites and online shops. These websites are cost effective marketing tools that has already been proven effective by many business organizations in the past years.

Being a graduate of a business course, I know how much your marketing strategy can affect the growth of your business. For some businesses, particularly those which are in the sales industry, their growth are determined through the increase in their sales. Using third party sellers or referrer which are better known as affiliates is a better way to increase your sales. The main reason for this is that you don’t have to spend a penny if you don’t make a sale. You will only have to pay commissions to your affiliates if their referrals result to actual sales.

Though using affiliates to market your business and generate sales is a great strategy, implementing and tracking such campaign is not easy without the right resources. Such task will require you a powerful software to manage and organize your affiliates, sales and reports. However, hiring an experienced programmer to create such program will be expensive. If you want this kind of software that is already proven to help you manage your affiliate program, try out the OSI affiliate software.

This PHP software will help you manage your affiliate program with ease. Here are the key feautures of the OSI affiliate software:

• Create Unlimited Affiliate Programs and Users
• Works with ALL Gateway Companies
• Multi-tier Affiliate System
• Duplicate Sale Protection
• Advertiser Tracker System
• Advanced Reporting
• Create Custom Email Campaigns
• Password Protected Backend
• Mange Thousands of Affiliates

What’s best about the OSI affiliate is that you can have this affiliate tracking software for less than a hundred dollars. That’s as cheap as it can get for a software that is this powerful. Whether you are just starting an affiliate program to increase your sales or you want to better manage your existing affiliate program, the OSI Affiliate is your ideal software.

When the term “internet marketing” is read or heard, the first thing that comes to mind is high search engine rankings. Though search engine optimization is an important part of internet marketing, SEO should not be your only focus. More than just building your backlinks, targeting the right keywords and stuffing your website with good content, marketing your products, services and websites in the internet requires a deeper and more comprehensive approach.

So your website has finally reached the first page of SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page) and you started to drive a good volume of organic and targeted traffic to your website. What’s next? Does this mean that we’ve crossed the finished line and achieved a successful internet marketing campaign? Well, I’m afraid not. Driving visitors to your website does not mean that your are actually capturing the interest and satisfying the needs of people but merely having them look at your site. Just think about this – How many of your visitors actually stay on your website for more than one minute and how many of them are going to visit your site again in the future?

Knowing, Understanding, Communicating and Predicting are the basic steps in a good internet marketing strategy. Tools like online surveys, analytics and other reports on trends can help you gather more data and analyze them to come up with good marketing approach.

If you are serious about optimizing your business potential by promoting it through the internet, don’t just do SEO! Give it everything you have – know the needs of your target audiences, understand these needs, provide them and reach out to say that “hey, I got just what you need”. But don’t forget that everything in the business world is dynamic so learn to predict trends based on reliable data.

Keywords Research is one of the pillars of SEO or search engine optimization. Without sufficient research on what keywords to target, all efforts to optimize your websites through search engines will be put to waste. Researching for target keywords needs to be done to determine the proper keywords that we will use for article or content creation, link building, onsite optimization and other related SEO tasks. In other words, you cannot successfully promote your website through search engines if you don’t execute a proper SEO keywords research.

Through keyword research, we will identify which keywords that are related to your website are used by most internet users and use them to optimize our websites. After all, there’s no sense in ranking number one for a search term or keyword that no one uses when searching through search engines. So the main concern in keywords research is to determine which keywords receive high to moderate search volume and using them in optimizing our websites.

There are a good number of free keywords suggestion and research tools in the internet that you can use in researching for key words or key phrases with high search volume. Here are some tools that I have used and I can recommend:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

The keyword suggestion tool by Google Adwords is meant to help advertisers in generating keywords for their PPC or Pay Per Click campaign. However, the tool is open for everyone to use and that is something that internet marketers can take advantage of. Through this free tool, you can see the most searched keywords in the most popular and widely used search engine in the internet today – Google. Details like approximate average number of searches per month, search volume from the previous month and the volume of competition from other Adwords advertisers will help you choose the right keywords to target. For future use and reference, you can also download the generated keywords in text or CSV format.

Forensics by Searchers.co.uk
Searchers.co.uk is a popular search engine in the United Kingdom which receives millions of users per month. If your target audience is primarily the UK, then Searchers.co.uk’s keyword research tool called Forensics is something that you could use. Searchers.co.uk is similar to other search engines but with more emphasis to indexing UK specific websites. This is the reason why this tool is helpful for SEO people looking to promote their websites in the UK. The information provided by Forensics is very similar that of Google Adword’s keyword tool but with a couple others added which are the Local Rank and Growth or change in search volume. These additional information can help you see and anticipate changes in trends in volumes of searches for particular keywords.

Wordtracker Keywords Suggestion Tool
Wordtracker is one of the first keyword research and suggestion tools in the internet. The free version of this tool can suggest you up to 100 most searched keywords and their number of searches made using them. Wordtracker uses metacrawlers to collect information about keywords and their search volumes. Unlike other keyword tools, wordtracker updates their databases weekly so you are sure to always get the latest, most searched and hottest keywords.

iWeb Tool Keyword Suggestion Tool
The keyword suggestion tool is just one of the free SEO and web tools offered by iWebTool.com. This tool returns up to 10 keyword suggestions based on your main keyword and allows a maximum of 5 searches in an hour for free. You can click the results to search for further similar keywords or click the icons of the top three major search engines to see the actual websites ranking for particular keywords. The tool is simple and is good for basic keyword research.

The purpose of keyword research is to identify which keywords that are related to your sites are likely to be used by internet users and deliver traffic to your websites. These tools can help us analyze what keywords currently have high search volumes and are frequently used by people in search engines. No one knows what search terms, keywords or key phrases are going to be popularly used in search engine queries by people in the future so periodic and constant keyword research is a must for optimizing websites

We all know that the heart and soul of search engine marketing lies in inbound links so we spend most of our time building links to our websites and our clients’ websites. Though links are not everything in SEO, they are the most important element or factor that will push your websites on top of SERPs (search engine results page) for your target. But how can a really good link be defined and compared to low quality or junk links? Here’s the complete guide that I use to determine how good a website is and if it’s worth buying or exchanging links with.

Search Engine Indexed and Cached
Though this is the most important aspect of a website to look into, many link buyers often skip this part of their evaluation. If a link is not indexed by a search engine, it will not do any good to your website. It is also important to check when the website was last cached by search engines. Cache is the snapshot or record  of the website taken by search engines like Google. Ideally, the website should be cached within the last two weeks.

You can check when the website was last cached by Google by searching: “cache:joedelsanvictores.com”

You can check the number of pages indexed by Google from a website by searching: “site:joedelsanvictores.com”

Google Pagerank
Most of the time, the first thing being considered in evaluating the quality of a website is its Pagerank. This is the Google’s measurement of a web page’s importance in the web. The higher the PR or pagerank of the page that your link is going to be placed on, the better it is for your search engine marketing. Yahoo! has its own version of PR which is called the Web Rank. However, I recommend that you use Google’s PR in evaluating the quality of a website. You can check the Pagerank of a webpage using these tools: SEO Logs PR Checker, Check PageRank, Dig Page Rank and Blog Flux PR checker. You can check the Pagerank by installing a Google toolbar and enabling the PageRank feature. Note that having a high Pagerank alone does not mean that the link you are getting on that site is high quality.

Back Links or Inbound Links of the Website
A website can have a Pagerank of 3/10 but how long do you think it will remain like that? Well, no one knows for sure. However, if the website has a good number of backlinks, the probability that its pagerank will retain or increase is higher. In checking backlinks, use the Yahoo Site Explorer. You should also check if the links are coming from different or just a few websites. Of course, it is better if the backlinks are coming from many different websites rather than a single or few websites.

Quality and Relevant Content
Having a link on just any website does not help your own website. Your backlinks should come from websites relevant to yours. If your website is about blogging and making money online, then a link from real estate websites will not help you much. A website that has quality content related to internet and blogging is what you should be looking for. Avoid websites that have duplicate or copied content. You can use Copyscape to check if the website you are acquiring links for do not have duplicate content.

Age and History of Websites
Links from older and well established sites are better for SEO. Just make sure that the domain of the website you are buying or exchanging links from has a clean history. Being clean mean it was not previously an adult or gambling related website which was then made to a fitness website. In checking the domain age of a website, you can use the Whois Tool of Domain Tools.

Through this whois tool, you can when exactly the domain of the website was registered, the name of domain registrar, nameservers used by the website and the IP address of the website. For the website’s history, you can check the archived history of a website through the Wayback Machine of Archive.org.

Number of Outbound Links
Always check how many outgoing links does the web page your link will be placed on currently have. If possible, negotiate with the webmaster, link broker or your link exchange partner on the maximum number of links they will place on the page. One page can only have a certain amount of “Link Juice” that it can pass to the websites it is linking to and that Link Juice is shared by all outbound or external links. This means that the less external links the webpage has, the more weight or “Link Juice” it can pass to your website.

Multiple IP Addresses
Search engines also analyze the IP addresses of the websites that link to your website. If the all websites that link to yours come from the same class-C and class-D IP addresses, those links will be considered as spam. The backlinks that you acquire should at least come from different class-C IP address. Gaining backlinks from different class-D IP addresses is not good enough and will still be flagged as spam. To find out the IP address of a website, you can use the Website IP Address Search Tool of Self SEO.

Search Engine Rankings
Acquiring a link from a relevant website that is ranking high in search engines is a big plus. However, you can rarely acquire such links. This is because most of these websites are also your competitors who are willing to spend time and money in promoting their websites in search engines. But you’ll never know when you might bump into a really high ranking website that’s selling links. Be sure to grab the opportunity if you bumped into one.

Traffic and Visitors
Another huge plus for the links that you are going to buy and exchange with is traffic. Though traffic does not affect search engine results, you’re getting your money’s worth if you get a link on a high traffic website. This is like hitting two birds with one stone. You can increase your search engine rankings and get your site promoted through referral of visitors at the same time. Most of the time, websites with high pagerank and high volume of traffic are really expensive.

Those are the things that you should be checking when buying or trading links with another website. Most of the time, you will not get positive results from some of the things evaluated above but deciding whether to purchase of trade links depends on what you think matters more. Is it pagerank, domain age, history of website or traffic? This is one aspect of internet marketing where SEO specialists and other search engine marketing people differ.

Before you actually purchase links, try some of these link evaluation methods to learn and understand how they actually work. This will prevent you from buying or trading with low quality links and will maximize your money’s worth in buying links.

For more than a year, I’ve been decently making money online and my earnings have been increasing at a good rate. I have been really confident that earning through the internet has been and will continuously be stable for me. When the United States government announced a global recession in late 2008, I just smiled and told myself that there’s nothing to worry about because internet has nothing to do with any financial institution.

However, I was definitely wrong! A few weeks after that, I immediately felt the decrease in the demand for my services and earnings. Then I kept on thinking, why would the global recession affect the internet industry?

Well, here’s my simple thought about how the global recession might be affecting the making money online. In a global recession there is a drop in demand or less spending by consumers. This means that the volume of sales of companies will drop and thus decrease their profits. In order to continue earning income, prevent loss or worst, bankruptcy, companies and service providers will implement cost cutting measures. Some of these are laying off jobs, lowering production and trimming down other expenses like marketing and advertising. Internet marketing includes buying and exchanging links, creating buzz using different mediums (which includes blogs) and advertising in other high traffic websites. Cutting costs in advertising causes less money to buy links, pay for article writers, less data entry employees and other common services outsourced through the internet.

The sad truth about global recession is that all industries are affected. The only difference is that some are hit harder than the others. Despite the decrease in the demand for my services in the past weeks, I’m still thankful that I’m not one of those employees who were laid off by their companies and are left jobless. Though my earnings are no longer as good as they used to be, the global recession has taught me to spend my money wisely because no one knows when my earnings will just drop.

For now, I have to keep myself busy, work extra hard and actively look for clients who might be interested in my services. According to the news, current global recession will last around 18 months and until it’s over, we all need to keep our belts buckled tight.

The internet world has provided a good source of income for a lot of people including me. However, the internet is not all about business and making money. This is also a place where you can meet new people and find friends from all over the world. And speaking of meeting people, I was very fortunate to have interviewed Stuart C. McHenry; the president of McKremie Web Hosting Solutions. Here’s my one-on-one interview with Stuart:

Joe: Hi Stuart! Can you tell our readers a little something about yourself and your company?
Stuart: Sure, I’ve been involved with the Internet since 1999 when my wife and I started a hobby website for her. About five years after that we started working on client web sites in the Marketing and web development areas. We had numerous request to host clients web sites and hosted a few on our own servers. In 2006 we decided to really focus on web hosting and make this our main priority and re-branded as McKremie, LLC.

Joe: How did you came up with the name of your company as McKremie?
Stuart: The simple answer is it’s a tribute to my daughter. Here is the long answer; we were looking for a unique word that didn’t mean anything to most people. We spent days if not weeks trying to come up with the perfect brandable name. I want people to think of one thing when they hear McKremie and that’s web hosting and our specific company.

When my daughter was little she could not pronounce our last name, like most kids that could not pronounce harder words. So instead of saying ‘McHenry’ she would say McKremie (Mick-Crem-ie) and we gave her that nickname. So when we were trying to think of the perfect company name we kept coming back to the name McKremie.

Joe: Well, that’s an interesting story. Moving over to the next question… What motivated you to start a web hosting company?
Stuart: I knew, and my clients at the time knew we could do a better job. There are tons of web hosting companies out there that offer support with their hosting accounts but when it comes down to it they don’t deliver. Prior to running a few dot com companies I spent over 13 years in the customer service industry. My experiences are invaluable and has shaped the outstanding service levels customers come to expect with McKremie.

Joe: What are the challenges of being the owner of McKremie Web Hosting Solutions and how do you deal with them?
Stuart: When we first started we could not offer the service level we wanted to provide. This is always difficult for a new hosting company starting out. It wasn’t in the budget to have support staff working 24 hours per day 7 days per week and we had to build up to that level. We focused on small business website hosting in our local markets at first. In December of 2007 we were able to offer 24/7 support both phone and email. This was the single biggest accomplishment to date for McKremie

Joe: With a saturated market and high level of competition in the web hosting industry, what do you think is the greatest advantage of McKremie Web Hosting?
Stuart: Customer Service! We strongly believe we need to be available when the customers need us. If they happen to need us at 3:00 AM in the morning, we are available to take their calls or answer their emails. Our servers are fast and our uptime runs high (99.9%+) but that doesn’t really set us apart from the competition, only our great customer service does. We recently just upgraded our support ticket software to better handle customer support issues. We are always looking for ways to serve our customer better and faster.

Joe: In your opinion, how did the global recession affected the internet industry, especially web hosting businesses?
Stuart: This is a hard question for me to answer, I know other companies are having a difficult time but our growth has been very good over this past year. Most of our customers hear about us from our current clients via word of mouth. I’m sure we would be even busier if the world economy was better but I cannot compare since we have such positive growth.

Joe: Aside from uptime, customer support is one of the most important considerations in choosing a web hosting provider. How can you describe the quality of McKremie’s customer support?
Stuart: Top notch support! We have support staff always available via phone or email 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and even on all major holidays. We often answer the phone within a few rings and emails are answered within minutes. As the President of McKremie, LLC I actively monitor support tickets to ensure high levels of service. You can read a few reviews for yourself and see what customers are saying.

Joe: What other services does McKremie offer aside from web hosting?
Stuart: We offer Web Design and Internet Marketing services. We currently aren’t taking any clients for marketing but may again in spring of 2009. We are excited to release a new service in a few weeks that we are calling Kizzog. Once we are ready to announce this new product I will be sure to let you know more about it.

Joe: I’m sure many of our readers now know more about McKremie. Now, why don’t you tell us something about your personal life. Like are you are married man, do you have kids and what do you like doing during your spare time?
Stuart: I’m married and have a daughter that is 9 years old. We enjoy traveling, snowboarding and just hanging out at the beach. We have three dogs a Saint Bernard, Golden Retriever and a little Maltese. The Saint Bernard weighs about 140 LBS and the little Maltese weighs just over a 2 LBS.

Joe: Thanks for letting us know more about you and your company. Is there anything that you want to add or tell our readers?
Stuart: Thanks Joe! Just want to let your readers know that we started a web hosting blog a few months back that talks about McKremie but also offers general web hosting tips and tricks that apply to most web hosts.

Well, there you go guys, the president of McKremie Web Hosting Solutions – upclose and personal. Overall, the interview was a great experience for me and we got to talk about both personal and business matters. Being the president of a web hosting company, it surprised me how friendly and accommodating Stuart is. It really gives me a positive feeling about a McKremie Web Hosting Solutions after knowing that headed by a great guy like Stuart.

The past 30 days have been crazy for me as I have been really busy with both my online business and my personal life. Because of that, I haven’t been able to update my blog for more than a month! Sad thing is it would probably take another month before I can catch up with the things that I’m scheduled to do. I just hope I can still find time to update my blog once in a while.

On the lighter side, I already have a few useful topics in mind for my future posts that will be helpful for both bloggers and SEO beginners. I’m all excited in writing them and sharing them to fellow bloggers. See you soon!

The official winners of the 68 Nuffnang Reviews contest have just been announced today and I’m very happy that my blog entry about NuffNang is one of them! I know that many Filipino bloggers joined and submitted their entries so I take pride in being one of the chosen ones among those entries.

My thanks to the NuffNang team for choosing my entry. I hope to see more contests from you guys and expect me to join every time.

Though the winners of this contest will be rewarded cash prizes of 500 Philippine Pesos each, it is not what is really important to me. What’s more important to me is that people, especially my fellow Pinoys, get to know that JoedelSanvictores.com does exist in the blogosphere and that it provides good and useful posts especially to other bloggers.

I would also like to extend my greetings to the other 67 winners of this contest. Great job guys!

With my earnings almost reaching the five digit mark, September was indeed a great month for me. However, I have to expect the worst for the coming months because the result of the September pagerank update, the second PR update in the third quarter of this year, was not good for me. I will need to exert extra efforts in building the links of my blogs to increase their pagerank for the next PR update. Anyway, despite of the negative results the last update September was a good month for me in general.

Almost every stat of this blogging tutorials blog has increased in a month. My Alexa rank broke the top 1,000,000 two weeks ago and it is currently on 824,654 with 152 inlinks. There was also a slight increase in my Technorati rank from 30,951 to 29,120 and increase in Technorati authority from 165 to 168. Here are my blog’s stats from the 3 major search engines in the internet:

Google Stats for JoedelSanvictores.com:
Backlinks: 73 (dropped from 83)
Indexed Pages: 241 (increased from 123)

Yahoo! Stats for JoedelSanvictores.com:
Backlinks: 12,967 (dropped from 14,773)
Indexed Pages: 172 (increased from 136)

MSN Stats for JoedelSanvictores.com:
Backlinks: N/A
Indexed Pages: 83 (dropped from 245)

I managed to publish a total of 9 posts for the month of September 2008. This explains the increase in my indexed pages in Google and Yahoo. I don’t know what happened to MSN though. My feed readers and email subscribers count has now increased to 138. The increase in my subscribers is credited to the quality and usefulness of the posts that I have published.

We are now in the fourth and final quarter of this year. Though it is almost impossible to retain my earnings from the previous month, I hope I can still manage to earn anywhere near it.

Google pagerank is usually updated around every after 90 days and it has only been 60 days since the last PR update which also occurred in the third quarter of this year. Just a couple of hours ago, I found out that one of my blogs dropped from PR4 to PR0. Not convinced with what page rank the Google toolbar showed me, I used a few PR checker tools to recheck my blog’s PR. Unfortunately, I got the same results over and over again. I manually checked the pagerank of all of my blogs and overall, the result of this Google page rank update is not really good for me.

I actually expected the next update to occur around the end of October 2008. To be honest, I did not have enough time to make sure that my blogs retain their pageranks. This is the reason why most of my blogs’ PR’s dropped. There are no surprises though for this blogging tutorials blog as its PR remains at page rank 3.

Well, I guess owners of weblogs and webmasters can now start working for the next update. Let’s just hope that Google gives us a good Christmas gift for the next pagerank update.

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