A Guide to SEO Resources and Discussion Groups (online business)
No commentsBy Irish Taylor
Finding the right SEO tools and resources can be challenging but were here to make it a little easier on you. SEO forums and newsgroups can be very confusing to a person with no SEO experience. These forums and newsgroups are just so heavily populated that they can intimidate many new users.
The first rule regarding these situations is to just slowly try to integrate yourself into the community. Follow these rules closely and concisely so that you do not offend anybody:
1. Do not spam the forum with your problems. If you have a few things that you would like to discuss you will probably get help, but do not try to hog all of the assistance for yourself. For one thing, most of your questions have already been answered, believe it or not. There is generally a search option. Always use this before posting your problem.
2. Do not Flame. Flaming is a term used among forum dwellers to describe the behavior of yelling at people via the forum. This is generally associated with cursing, constant argument, typing in all caps to try to convey anger, and dismissing other peoples posts in an undignified fashion. There are other problems that are included in flaming, but I have given you the jist of it.
3. Never take a post off topic. If there is something that you would like to discuss that was inspired by a post on another topic, post a new topic in the appropriate board and explain where the topic was conceived. You may still want to reply to the post just to let people know that the topic has been created so that somebody else doesnt take it off topic.
4. Do not bump your thread (or post). Bumping a post is when you reply to your own post in hopes of getting a response sooner. The only time that this is acceptable is if your thread has laid dormant for about a week. Bumped threads are very annoying to most forum users. Bumping posts on a regular basis will probably lead to a lack of interest in your posts and will probably contribute to a lack of support in your ventures.
6. Be friendly. There is no reason that you cant be completely polite when posting on a forum. You will get very good response if you are simply polite in your post. Politeness in the world of forums includes making sure that you have communicated your problem carefully so that people attempting to help you can understand and provide answers to the best of their abilities.
7. Join in on the community favorites. Many forums now include games which are occasionally pretty fun. They are pretty much just there for if you are bored and waiting for a response to your other posts, but they are enjoyable if you keep up with them as many forum dwellers are quite articulate and witty.
Heres a list of resources that you can use when you need help but you dont want to pay for it.
Finding Groups.
Google makes discussion groups easy to find with their Google Groups tool (groups.google.com). Go there and type in seo to see whats on offer. Two popular groups are alt.internet.search-engines and alt.www.webmaster. If you dont like Googles groups, try Yahoos instead (groups.yahoo.com). Either of these sources will provide you with a pretty substantial list. Remember, regular search engine listings seem to apply here so generally you will see the best results towards the top of the listing.
dmoz.org is a good place to start: from their home page, you can browse down to any subject you want, and you should find at least one mailing list, discussion forum or message board in the listing.
There are several forums out there on the web that focus on SEO, and you can learn a lot from all of them, even if some of the discussions are over your head at first. Even ordinary searchers can learn a lot from following these discussions, as they tell you a lot about how search engines work.
Here are some useful forums: WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, ThreadWatch, Best Practices Search Engine Forums, cre8asite forums and the High Rankings Forum. Check them out.
http://www.easypostcardmarketing.com/articles/A_Guide_to_SEO_Resources_and_Discussion_Groups.html
Contacing and Developing Great Relationships with Insurance Agents
By Erik Olson
If you have a service that can be marketed to insurance agents, you know how difficult that can be. In every major city, there are hundreds if not thousands of different insurance agents within it. When you consider the nation as a whole, there are over 400,000 different insurance agents. While your product might benefit all of them, unless they know about it, it wont. Therefore you have to find a way to get your service or product into their hands. What is the best way to do this?
Using a list is a great way to increase your effectiveness. This will speed up the process exponentially and will make you more successful. How exactly does a good list help?
If the list is up-to-date, you wont waste your time chasing down old leads. There is nothing more annoying than dialing a number just to find out that its been disconnected. On second thought, it might be more annoying to visit an insurance agent, only to find out theyve went out of business. Either way, youre wasting your precious time. With an accurate list, you can only market to businesses that are still in business.
Another way that an effective list can help is by seeing which services insurance agents offer. If you market a service that helps home insurance, you dont want to market to agents who only sell car insurance. This is a waste of your time and theirs. You wont make many friends or money in the process.
Many lists compile their results from the state licensing board. This may be considered a good place to start, but it wont give you the detailed results that you need. With this method you wont know what they sell and you wont have multiple forms of contact.
When you market anything to insurance agents, the best way to do so is through multiple contacts. You have to constantly email, call, fax, and direct mail in order to get any kind of successful results. Without consistent action, you wont get very far. If you only have their phone number, theyll probably get sick of talking to you on the phone. However, if you have their address and email, you can send less threatening forms of communication. They will appreciate this more and will reward you for it with their business.
Insurance Agents list is NCOA (national change of address) validated and email lists are scrubbed. Most list sellers are selling outdated data that wont get you very far. With Insurance Agents lists, you get only the most up-to-date information for your business needs.
If you market your services to insurance agents, you need to keep a steady stream of leads. Without a good list you will be struggling to find customers. We all know that a business without customers isnt really a business at all. If you need a quality list of insurance agents, look no further than Insurance Agents. They will have exactly what youve been looking for all along.
Buy Insurance Agent List From The #1 Trusted Source For Life, Health, Home, Auto Insurance Agent Marketing, Mailing, and Email Company. 1-800-280-4904 Free CRM with Help Desk and Reseller Program
How Social Media Can Boost Your Business
By Deep Arora
These days there are those who would argue you would have to be living under the proverbial rock to not have at least heard of social media. Even those out there who arent even slightly internet savvy have heard of Facebook or MySpace. Social media are the tools that are utilised by just such sites, and there is an increasing number of businesses out there that are developing a presence in this field as well.
With a tool such as Facebook there are businesses out there that are developing enormous followings, and this is an advantageous step to take. If you have everything in good working order, and you are well connected with your customers, then social media gives you an opportunity to feel updates directly to your customers own pages. This makes it one of the easiest possible ways to keep your customers or potential customers up to date with everything you are doing, all from the one place and simultaneously. Even email cant boast being quite so streamlined!
Another popular new social media tool that has taken off in a big way, is Twitter. This is toll that sends out short messages, around 140 characters max. To those linked into receive your updates. As with Facebook this is a direct line of communication with your customers, and if you are clever with how you use these short and sharp tweets you can get your message across to your customers in a witty and succinct format. There is also the possibility for those interested to have this linked into their mobile phones, receiving your twitters as text messages. For the originator of the tweet, it is possible to link your tweets into your web page or blog via an RSS feed.
This brings us to the other social media platform that has shown phenomenal expansion over the last little while, blogging. Few of us arent familiar with blogging these days, so the question that many are asking is how it is of benefit to a business. Well as with Facebook or Twitter this is a great format that allows direct communication with customers.
Creating a business blog however, allows you to go much further than this. For starters a blog is not limited to 140 characters! That said, a blog provides you with the opportunity to show your expertise in your area of business. You can communicate new ideas and developments to your customers and communicate with them via the blog space. Customers have the opportunity to leave comments and this allows you to develop better understanding of their particular needs.
These are only a few of the social media opportunities that are available, there is a number of others that are also worthwhile exploring if you are serious about using this format to grow your business. If you are ready to start linking in with customer and expanding and developing your direct communications, then these options are worth taking the time to explore. As marketing tools go these are some of the cheapest and easiest forms of direct communication tools around. Investigate which options to pursue, and consider the fairly small outlay for getting these up and running. Especially these tools may hold great appeal for the small business owner with the bottom line to consider.
Deep Arora is an Internet marketer with over 7 years of online experience and he teaches internet marketing from his blog at HowIDid.com. Check out his blog for some amazing techniques today..
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Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 7:20 pm and is filed under marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
