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Knowing the Buyer’s Intent - Free Keyword Help From Microsoft

How would you like to know if the visitor coming to your site is a buyer or just a looker? How would you like to have more buyers than lookers visit your website? Microsoft has developed a free resource to help do exactly that.

The tool has a fancy name - Detecting Online Commercial Intention - and some complex calculations behind it. Fortunately Microsoft has made it easy to use.

You probably already know that Keywords are the Critical Success Factor in getting the right visitors to your website and into your business. You want traffic that is looking for your products and services. People find those by using specific words and phrases - Keywords - on search engines - Google, Yahoo, etc. Therefore in order for people to find you the website and its content must be created around the specific keywords that people are using to find your specific market and niche.

This leaves a gapping hole for our needs however as website and business owners. People use the web to either just find information and because they are looking to buy something. We want those buyers looking to buy something - preferable in our office or store. This is where Microsoft’s “Detecting Online Commercial Intention” tool comes in.

Using the website Detecting Online Commercial Intention you can learn which keywords attract buyers and which are simply keywords used to find information. Microsoft says it this way:

“Web page searches display two levels of commercial intent: informational and transactional. This tool can detect customer intent to acquire information or to purchase products based on their search queries or recently visited URLs. For example, if a customer searches for “canon digital camera”, it is likely that they want to purchase a canon digital camera; therefore, the online commercial intent is strong, with a confidence level larger than 0.5.”

“This tool can be used to find keywords that are commercial but have low ad coverage. From a SEM point of view, it is useful to find these keywords as they have low bid density (low price), but high commercial value. Similarly, for an advertizing engine, this can help increase ad relevancy by displaying fewer ads if a keyword has low online commercial intent.”

Although the technology behind how the site determines the keyword’s effectiveness for knowing buying intent (Detecting Online Commercial Intention) is complex -see below - the site is easy to use. Simply type in the keyword or phrase and Microsoft will produce a percentage number on its value - or the likelihood that a person using this term is to buy what they find. The result is in a .00 form, so .20 would be 20% and so forth. Anything over a .50 (50%) is considered good.

Keywords are the critical success factor for getting both paid and organic traffic to your website. Knowing if they produce business is the most important question. Until now the only way to do this is to measure the conversion rate - sales - of different keywords based on the articles, advertising, and experience. Unfortunitly this information is historical data - hindsight - meaning you’ve had to use them and pay for them without knowing first their effectiveness.

Microsoft has provided the missing link of keyword research. Now you can get a better idea if the keywords used will produce visitors who are buyers or just lookers. This is very important, especially if your’e paying for advertising, such as Adwords, which are based on keywords and costs money every time someone clicks on them.

Another Free - Quick - Easy tool for you to use.

Free Photo Editing Software - Paint.NET a Photoshop Alternative

As you post on your Blog there will come a time when you want to add graphics and pictures to your website. The most popular software for creating and editing pictures is Adobe’s Photoshop. However it costs lots of money. There are several great alternatives. Two of my favorites are Paint.NET and GIMP. The power of this program is remarkable - far beyond what most of us need or will ever use. However some image editing always does have to be done, if only to crop out an unwanted area of a picture to resize an image for putting it on the web.

I use Paint.NET because its easy to use for the graphically challenged among us. Paint.NET will accept Photoshop files. It will also edit, crop and save your images into different formats, all of which are necessary for getting pictures onto the web.

This is what the Paint.NET website says about the program:

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.

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Below is a screenshots of Paint.net in action. Another great tool that doesn’t kill your wallet, in fact it’s (can you guess what I’m going to say?) Free Quick and Easy. Cheers.

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Website Naming - Harder Than Ever

Naming your website is one of the most important decisions that you will have to make - and one of the earliest. It should reflect what you do or your niche and be as close to your offline business as possible.

The problem is that with so many existing websites finding a good name that isn’t taken can difficult. Most webhosts provide a service to check on names for you however they are time consuming and hit and miss. Here is a website that will look up a name and offer suggestions based on keywords: DomainsBot. It is free, easy to use and quick - all the things I like. Happy site naming…

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Keyword Brainstorming

Keywords are the work horses of the Internet. Keywords are the critical success factor of any business that wants to get business from the Web - offline or online businesses. Local Businesses especially must have the right keywords in their content and on their site to attract new customers.

Sometimes however we get stumped trying to brainstorm the effective keywords for our niche and our business. Kwmap in a free resource that will help brainstorm and link different keywords in an attractive and intuitive display.

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As you can see from the website picture Kwmap will not only graph the keyword you search on but provide an entire list of associated keywords and relevent sites. You can drill down on the differnt keywords by clicking on them. Kwmap also allows you to link your site and url directy - in other words free publicity and networking for your business’ website.

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Another Free - Quick - and Easy resource for those wanting to take the Business Web Step.

Remarkable find: SocialMarker does the work for you

Every now and then you find a gem on the internet, a tool or website that makes your life so much easier that you don’t know how you lived without it. Recently I found such a treasure in SocialMarker. What makes this site so remarkable is that it is not only FREE but easy to use and a huge huge time saver.

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Growth requires new business. New business requires people seeing our offer - prospects - traffic in the online world. Everysite wants more traffic, including the websites of a local business.

To build traffic you need to network in at least 3 ways:

• Article Directories
• Website Directories
• Social Newtworks

Social Networks are increasing becoming the most important element for driving traffic (organic, that is unpaid traffic) on the web. Propeller, Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Technorati, Del.icio.us, to mention only a few are becoming critical success factors for websites.

What is it?

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness! That’s where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.

How Do You Use It?

All you need to do is simply drag this button to your bookmarks toolbar, in order to create a submission bookmarklet. When you are on a website that you want to socially mark, simply select the text and click the SocialMarker button to pre-populate the submission form with the selected information.

Why SocialMarker?

It can help you spread a link on 47 of the best social bookmarking sites in under 15 minutes!

• It helps you get a lot of backlinks.
• It helps you increase your traffic.
• Your link gets indexed by Google in a matter of minutes.
• Best of all, it’s free!

Of course the problem is who has time to enter information and link to all of these sites? No-one - or at least no-one who has to work for a living. Social Marker has taken the work out of the process. Here are the steps:

1. Sign up and get an account at the socai networking

2. Find interesting information and highlight what you want posted on the networking sites

3. Hit the link or bookmark that takes you back to SocialMarker

4. The information is automatically populated and the site takes you through each social network you’ve checked off to post the links.

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One of the great features of the site is that if you’re not registered with one of the social networks it allows registering without leaving the process of posting the information or loosing your place. Once you’ve registered and told your computer to keep you logged in then the entire process is automatic. Unbelievably fast, easy, and effective. Just take a look at the popular social networks SocialMarker works with:

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If you’re reading this and you want to build traffic - which I hope is everyone - check out SocialMarker. It’s free, quick, and easy. My signature theme - free quick, and easy. Cheers…Russ

Free Blog Statistics - Find Out the Who and What About Your Visitors

We spend all this time creating and adding content to our blogs. Do ever wonder if anyone is reading them? Want to know which pages are popular and what is getting read? Well there are a lot of expensive statistics and web metrics services out there - too rich for my blood. I just found a free resource for keeping track of what is going on at a Blog: MyBlogLog. It’s part of Yahoo and as always its Free - Quick - Easy

If you already have a Yahoo account MyBlogLog you are already signed up. Just enter your Blog information and you’ll get a complete record of the visitors to your Blog and the pages they visit! Great stuff.

Below is a screenshot of the information MyBlogLog provides. This was only minutes after I added the script to my Blog (very easy - they provide the code and you just cut and past it into the Wordpress Theme).

As always its Free - Quick - Easy

Click on an Image to see it more clearly

A Great FREE HTML Editor

As you know I’m a big fan of Wordpress because you don’t have to be technical or be a programmer to use it. However recently I’ve come across situations where I need to have some information in html (the web language). For example, when publishing articles some sites want the article in html format so that the titles and margins are pre-formated for the web. MS Word doesn’t work because it puts in strange codes and has special characters. Using the Windows Notepad means having to learn html and code every instruction. No way.

Well for such a simple thing I didn’t want to spend a fortune for software. Sure website creation software such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage are great and powerful. However they cost hundreds of dollars and have pretty steep learning curves. Fortunately I just found a Free web page editor and creator and couldn’t wait to share it with you.

KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing. It is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

Oh and did I mention that it’s Free. Try it out here:

http://kompozer.net/

Get your Website & RSS feeds promoted for free

Here are some sites I found that allow you to link your website to and accept your RSS feed. Linking takes time but will build your site’s traffic. The sites below required only seconds to use and get connected with - no email or long registration process (mostly). I’ve checked out and confirmed that these sites work and that you can get registered on them - if you have good content.

Name: Blogarama
URL Address: www.blogarama.com
Description: A small search engine that will give you a directory listing
Add your blog here:http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/

Name: IceRocket
URL Address: http://www.icerocket.com
Description: A quick one-step link for your RSS feed
Add your blog here:http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=ping

Name: RDF Ticker
URL Address: http://www.anse.de/rdfticker/findchannels.php
Description: A link for your RSS feed, news oriented
Add your blog here:http://www.anse.de/rdfticker/addchannel.php

Name: Readablog
URL Address: http://www.readablog.com/
Description: A quick one-step link for your a website blog or RSS feed
Add your blog here:http://www.readablog.com/AddFeed.aspx

Name: Technorati
URL Address: http://www.technorati.com/
Description: Have to register and confirm with an email. However one of the most important sites on the web right now
Add your blog here:http://www.technorati.com/account/signup

231) Best Directory

http://www.directorybest.info/

Best Directory Anyone can use this directory without signing up to any service. Feeds are divided in 14 main categories, which are divided in two sub-categories themselves.

If you want to submit your feed, all you need to do is to pick the appropriate category, select the sub-categories in which your feed will best fit, provide a feed link, name, description and email, and finally the submission method:

• Free: No registration needed, nothing to pay, but your feed won’t be high until it is rated.
• Exchange: You can get a higher place, for free, by placing a link to Best Directory on your page.

Submit your feed to Best Directory.


230) Blogged

http://www.blogged.com/



Blogged is an online blog directory that you can use to discover and promote interesting blogs

Currently featuring 200,000 blogs this is a very popular resource to get listed at. Blogs are reviewed, rated, and categorized by editors, but anyone with an account can review and rate a blog to help it rise in the rankings. You can browse them by topic, rating, or simply searching for any keyword.

If you want to add your blog to the directory, you will just have to sign up to the service for free, and provide the RSS feed of your site.

Sign up and submit your feed to Blogged.


224) Webloogle

http://www.webloogle.com/



Webloogle is a blog directory where anyone can submit his own RSS feed URL and keep an eye on how his blog is going.

Webloogle will offer you a dedicated page on which it’ll show information, ratings, statistics of your site, and also a link that other people can click to write a review about your site. Requires a bit more time than the other links - the site has an approval process and they’ll email you with the results. Worth the investment of time and effort

Feeds can be browsed by category, ordered by ranking, or simply searched through the search form.

Submit your feed to Webloogle.





Getting the Word Out - Blog Carnivals

Written by admin on 6th July, 2008 .....  Print This Post

So you’ve got a website. Hopefully it is or has a Blog where you can interact with your visitors and customers. Now what? How do you get the word out that your Blog even exists?

Well that is the million dollar question and there are many answers, many ways of generating traffic to your webblog. A great Free - Quick - Easy way is a Blog Carnival. A what? A Blog Carnival - like Blog Carnival.

A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.

There is so much stuff in the blog-o-sphere, just finding interesting stuff is hard. If there is a carnival for a topic you are interested in, following that carnival is a great way to learn what bloggers are saying about that topic. If you are blogging on that topic, the carnival is the place to share your work with like-minded bloggers.

• Blog Carnival is the place to come to find carnivals you are interested in, to submit your blog articles to carnivals where they belong, and to organize and maintain carnivals.

A blog carnival is similar to an online magazine where a group of people with similar interests and topics converge to create, review, and discuss the articles. Blog carnivals are usually established to draw traffic to a blogger?s site and increase topic or product exposure. Not only do they increase traffic, you are able to exchange email addresses with a large community of people who have shared interests and expand your network in the online marketplace.

The carnival is established by an organizer and hosted by a designated blogger, who solicits and collects articles from contributors to the carnival, and organizes them into a single source. This single source is essentially an “online magazine” with links to various blogger sites and articles.

There are many Blog Carnivals on the web. A quick Google search will find those in your niche. Most have multiple topics and searchable categories. A great one is Blog Carnival. Getting listed in these carnivals is another Free - Quick - Easy traffic tool in your tool box.



Here you can find my first effort on creating a Blog Carnival, Click here to check out BusinessWebStep in the Carnival Universe