Your business blog is one of the best ways to get others to link to your site. A blog is less formal than an article and more conversational. You have the power to make your industry interesting to your readers through conversational writing. The blog is not about you. It is about providing value for your customers. If you offer outstanding content and regular industry comment, people are likely to link to it, increasing your site’s link popularity. Remember, links are good.

Practical Example: When you blog you are elevating your status to expert level. People are rather buy from experts than sales people. Provide valuable content to your visitors, and they will spread the word. If you have a blog about fly fishing, your readers are more likely to buy from you than another business that simply lists fly fishing equipment on their site. In addition to becoming customers, they will recommend your business to others, in essence become your unpaid external sales force.

You can significantly increase your visibility when you write articles in your area of expertise. Be sure that your articles are informational. Don’t waste anybody’s time with commercials disguised as articles. The key to successful article writing is to provide value. People will notice when you have something of value to say.

Articles deemed valuable are; posted on article directories; e-mailed in newsletters, embedded in e-commerce site. In most cases, the author receives a link to his website. The links help in a couple of ways. One, they generate traffic to the site. Second, links help to improve your search engine results. The more links you have pointing to your site the better. Search engines view links to your site as a vote of confidence. The more links you have pointing to your site the more valuable your web site becomes.

You can contact website that might benefit from your articles, and offer your articles. Just ask that a link to your website and a one-line description of what you offer be included with the article. Articles offer an effective “viral” approach that can produce hundreds, or even thousands, of links to your site over time.

Practical Example: As you become a prolific author of articles related to your service you build reputation. Through your articles, you enable you customers to find your website indirectly. A business owner may find one of your articles while searching for marketing advice online. After she reads your article, she may click the link to your site from within the byline. Because you have already provided her with value, she is more likely to become a customer.

The key to online marketing is quality content. To get ahead of your competition, you have to be prepared to write well. The ability to write well is an advantage in terms of social media marketing and search engine marketing. In addition to written content, Video and audio are effective online marketing methods.

The best online marketers are experts at getting other spread the word about their products or services. Dedicate yourself to provide remarkable content to empower others to help you get the word out about your business. Take advantage of the inherent viral make up of Internet.

In addition to your customers, take advantage of technology to improve usability. For instance, log files tell you which pages are most visited and for how long, unique vs. repeat visitors, etc. They will not tell you whether users found what they wanted, or why they abandoned their shopping carts.

Many services advise on predictable problems such as broken links, missing ALT tags for images, page load performance, but are as anticipated unable to spot complex things like difficulty in locating products, awkward navigation, meaningless graphics, or poor results from on site search.

Flow

It is important to create a uniform feel for your website. Uniform doesn’t mean boring, rather it mean consistent. When a visitor lands on your homepage your goal is to engage the user. As the user browses through the site, a uniform feel is going to simplify the user experience. One of the worst web sites make every page look wildly different, so the visitor never becomes comfortable with the site. If you make your web pages utterly different, it is less likely that your visitor becomes quickly familiar with the site.

Images

There is nothing more boring than a website without images. A site with text only is dull and overwhelming at the same time. Images can create excitement and help spice up your content. The most important concern with images is file size. Images can be fairly large files, slowing down the page load process. If your images are too large, or you have too many, reduce the number of images or the file size.

Speed

You can’t afford to lose visitors because they give up waiting for your entire page to load. The Internet is a fast moving superhighway, and if you website doesn’t keep up it’s going to be left behind. Page load has to do with file size, server performance, and available network bandwidth. Although more-and-more people connect to the Internet through fast broadband connections, keep in mind the dial up users too.

Flash

Avoid Flash websites at, almost, all cost because it lowers usability. Flash encourages design abuse as it slows websites. There is nothing worse than visiting a website and having to wait for a clever Flash animation to load. Your customers are visiting your site because they are looking for a product or service. They, for the most part, could not care less about viewing a flash movie. Sorry, the “skip intro” button is not much help either. Flash intros are slow, obnoxious, and will result in loss of revenue. Don’t add flash for the cool factor. Unless it serves a purpose, forget it.

Many Flash designers reduce the granularity of user control and regress to old school presentation styles that resemble television age media rather than cyber age media. Websites that force visitors to sit through sequences with nothing to do eradicate the single most important characteristic of the Internet, interactivity.

Once a static website has been published it will not change until the next edition. A dynamic website, on the other hand, relies on a backend engine to change site content. Dynamic site content is changed on the fly while static content modified through editions. Deciding whether static or dynamic sites are better is like determining whether vanilla or chocolate ice cream is better. It truly depends on your situation, and your needs.

            Dynamic websites yield more to the interactive makeup of the Internet. Because dynamic site modification does not require knowledge of html, it simplifies editing. Users are empowered, for they are enabled to make changes to the site.

            The decision is yours to make, and it should be based on your needs. Most websites are infrequently edited, and, unfortunately, are not at all interactive. Therefore, a static site is the logical choice. For example, if you are an insurance broker and you just want to have an online brochure website, a static web site will do. On the other hand, an online business that plans to list hundreds of products should opt for the dynamic option.

            Dynamic websites are more expensive to implement because they require skilled professionals. While a graphics artist may be able to create a static website, they lack the programming skills required to implement such a solution. In addition, dynamic websites are less search engine friendly than static sites. Search engine spiders struggle to crawl through certain dynamic sites due to the often long and complicated URLs.

Real world example: URL’s of dynamically generated sites often contain percentage signs (%), question marks (?), and other symbols such as &, + and $ or text such as cgi-bin. Although search engine spiders have become better at reading URL parameters (text after the question mark), but have a hard time when there are too many and therefore certain pages on dynamic sites with many URL parameters are not crawled.

Static Site

Pros - Inexpensive development, Quick deployment, Low skill level required

Cons - Updates require html editing, Lack of interactivity, Stagnant content

Dynamic Site

Pros - Highly Scalable, Interactive, Updates don’t require html skills

Cons - Expensive to implement, Search engine unfriendly

Think of affiliates as business partners. They can help market your product, drive traffic to your site, help you generate leads, and more. Affiliates are business allies helping you succeed. If you play your cards right, they can take your business to the next level. Affiliates are only paid for results.

Depending on the affiliate program they are usually paid for sales or leads.  The most common payment method is cost per sale. Affiliates can earn a percentage of sale or a fixed dollar amount per transaction. Affiliates are paid for performance. If they don’t perform they don’t get paid.

Affiliates market products by building websites. The same general rule applies to affiliate websites as any other website, the more traffic you get the better. Affiliates devote a great deal of effort to driving traffic to their sites through various means such as Pay Per Click campaigns, search engine optimization, blogging, article submission, link exchange, and the like. Affiliates can be individuals or businesses.