SpeedieConsulting

You understand that you need to build links in order to drive your site up the search engines and also to drive direct traffic, but you are struggling to find out where you can get links from that are both useful land relevant to your business.

Here are a couple of ideas to get you going….

Google Alerts

Using Google alerts means you can have link building opportunities sent straight to your inbox every day by keyword! Using the “comprehensive” setting will means you will get new pages by keyword from Google search, Google News and Google Blog Search. Therefore you will have ample sources and places to investigate to drive links back by adding comments on these pages.

Bonus Tip: You can also use these as ideas for writing your own content too.

Forums

Forums are a great source of info and user generated content and taking part actively can be a great way to increase the exposure of your website and also the links to your website form your Forum footer file and your profile page. That said who has time to sit on forums all day. Well now you don’t have too as using a trick I picked up using Google Alerts, you can have new, relevant keyword based posts sent to your inbox daily too!

Instead of simply setting up Google alerts on keywords you set them up to pull in the search string of the forum url. Confused, don’t worry here’s an example:

site:www.sitepoint.com/forums/ “keyword”

Replace “keyword” with your keyword you want to return results on. You use the string above that is relevant to the forum you wish to add an alert to.

This is a great way to have forums tell you when new content / posts are added on the keywords that relate to your business.

If the thought of all that email scares you, there is a new service recently launched that will do all of this for you and search many more different options besides. You can read more about it here:  BackLinkAgent

Finance and insurance products can get quite complicated and this is one thing that switches people off faster than anything else. So finding a way of making something easy to digest is always a good thing. Multi part email courses are one technique that most internet marketers use to build a mailing list. This in itself is a good thing, but if we look at the purpose of this exercise being to educate the site visitor, then breaking down something into manageable chunks and delivering it daily is a great thing.

Couple that with the ability to brand it, add in calls to action, and market it as a free resource; not only does it educate your site visitors to allow them to make more informed decisions it is also:

• A mailing list builder
• A good PR opportunity
• A USP in a crowded space
• Automatic – Once set up they run on autopilot delivering messages as you set them up.
• Follows up for you. You can automate follow-ups after the course is delivered to maximise its effectiveness.

So how do you construct a course? Firstly, think how many days you want to use for your course, some courses are all done in a single PDF report download, or you can run a chunk sized 3, 5, or 7 day course. We see more response form a multi part option as you are currently being seen in your visitor’s inbox. We have seen the best results with a 5 or 7 day course.

When you have chosen the number of days, collect a list of potential subjects for each day. This usually works best as a question. For example

Day 1 Income Protection – What is it?
Day 2 Income Protection – Why do I need it?
Etc….

As you can see, you now have the opportunity to answer that question in an easy quickly way that makes sense. You are looking for no more than 500 words for this as you want to make sure the visitors gets the main points as he/ she will be getting more from you tomorrow.

Work through the next few days’ worth of content and then you have a course all ready. The next step is to setup a system to manage and deliver the email course when people what it. There are great system that will deliver this for you 24/7 –so the users gets the info when they want it not when you can deliver it.

These tools are called Autoresponders. We use them to deliver all our courses and freebies so we can automate our follow ups. The best two online systems we have found or this are: AWeber and GetResponse. We have been using GetResponse for the last 5 years and it has never let us down. You can’t go too far wrong with either of these services.

Do you see that an email course could be beneficial for you but don’t have the time or ability to get it done. Well, we can do it all for you. We can even help setup the mechanism to deliver the course and build the list for you.

For more information use our contact form and we will get in touch shortly. We offer a range of services here from just writing a bespoke course for you, or we can provide you one we have already using elsewhere. All you need to do is get in touch…

Building links is one of the major cornerstones of any SEO or internet marketing campaigns. Now, there are a hundred and one different ways to build links but most services out there will offer you an automated solution that sounds great because you don’t have to do anything.

And therein lays the first problem. Most automated link building solutions are not that clever and will not give you exactly what you need. Add to the fact that most of these services will leave a footprint a mile wide for anyone to see that this is not natural link building. Plus they will only tend to focus on one or two methods of linking building. If that method falls out of favour, your site will drop lower in the rankings not climb higher.

What’s the alternative?

The main alternative is to adopt some form of human intervention, which means do some of this stuff yourself or get someone to do it for you. In order to do this you need to understand that link building like most things in life is about mitigating the risk and keeping all your eggs evenly placed around lots of different baskets.

Some of the methods you can employ include:

• Article Syndication
• Press Syndication
• Directory Submissions
• Buy Links (not advised but needs to be mentioned)
• Forum Posts
• Link Exchanges
• Blog Posting
• Social Profiles
• Web 2.0
• Web Video
• Podcasting

And within each of these methods are a whole bunch of specific sub methods relevant to each one.

So as you can see there could be a lot of work here for someone to do for you.

We would suggest that you pick four or five of the above areas and start (slowly) increasing activity in these areas. Yes you can go out and “buy” hundreds if not thousands of links but why run the risk of being penalised – and on top of that link buying is against most T&Cs of the bigger search engines (not that they currently do much about it)

If you are interested in having a strategy developed for you then why not get in touch via our contact form. If however, you feel you want to take this stuff on yourself but just really need help identifying link opportunities yourself you should look at a newly launched service called BackLinkAgent. It is not an automated tool but will easily help you find relevant linking opportunities for you to exploit.

You can read more about it here: BackLinkAgent

Article marketing is one of the easiest, low cost ways to drive business, increase your exposure and increase your website traffic.

In essence, article marketing is simply a case of picking a topic and writing a 500 word or more article in a non salesy way. The idea is to provide the reader with information that they can use. If they like the way you write and like your style they can use you. This is the ultimate presell technique, give them something for nothing and let your article do the talking.

So, as an example you could write an article about saving money on your insurance premiums. Once written and spell checked (most important) you can then start the process of getting this article published. Online, you can simply visit loads of article sites that will list and publish your article for free.

But don’t fall into the trap of thinking more is better, there are services that will submit your article to 10,000 article sites. Now while this may seem like a good idea, it really is a waste of time and money. There is a list of the better article directories below and to be honest it is quick a small list.

Article directories offer you three main benefits:

1. They will attract direct traffic to them as the main ones are popular
2. They are used by other webmasters looking for site content and they could use one of your articles on their site and to do this they will have to give you a link back to your main website.
3. Some of these article sites are so popular they rank very highly in Google and your article could feature on search results page very quickly.

Article Directories

www.ezinearticles.com
www.articlealley.com
www.articledashboard.com
www.articlecity.com
www.goarticles.com

Here are a few more tips that we have used to really drive more people back to our website.

1. Write a useful article; don’t worry about making search engine friendly and worrying about number of keywords and all that. Make it useful and it will take of business for you.
2. You will be able to add a resource box on the article which is your chance to say who you are and what you do. A good way to drive traffic back to your site is if you have a long article, split it in two, post one part out the different places and tell people in your resource box that to get part two they have to visit your site.
3. Build your own Niche submission list. While we recommend the 5 site above, there could be other niche directories, websites or publications that accept article submissions. Try the publications that you receive each month. Do they accept submissions? Have a look in the news agents.
4. Be consistent – This is the tricky one as life and work usually kick in at some point. You need to try and establish a schedule to works. Will you send out one article per week, or one a month, whatever “your” schedule, try and stick with it.
5. Outsource – There are services which could prepare and submit articles on your behalf. You would just need to give them a list of topics each week or month and maybe even some quotes to drop into each one.

Article marketing is a good way for any business to drive leads, search rankings and traffic, mortgage and insurance brokers have a big advantage over the majority of current article writer in their space. They have experience, case studies and knowledge.

Look around the article marketing sites currently and most insurance articles are written by website owners, not brokers, looking to build leads and drive online sales to earn commissions. They use it, as it is low cost and works well for them.

Isn’t it about time you made the move to writing?  If you see the benefits of article marketing but just getting ther time to do it when why not drop us a line using our contact form.  We offer a wide range of web content and article marketing services.

If your business offers an online newsletter (and if it doesn’t why not?), one thing you want more than anything else is subscribers. But lots of small businesses have the mentality that “once you build it, they will come”. This is why most have mailing lists have single figure lists.

You need to promote your newsletter or email signup box to drive more subscribers. So how do you do it?

Here are some techniques that I have used to drive more subscribers to my email lists.

1. Add a subscription box to every page on your website and make it above the fold so as soon as they see your site they can signup. Remember not eveyone will visit your site via the front door that is your homepage!

2. Add a link to a sample issue or your archive so potential subscribers can see what they are signing up to. This may reduce the number of signups but those that do will be more likely to open what you send them!

3. Make sure you clearly define your Privacy Policy – If you are going to send their details to third parties then tell them! Reassure them!

4. Contact other newsletter editors and offer a trade for advertising. They promote your newsletter and you do likewise. Make though that it is a relevant publication.

5. Register your Newsletter with Newsletter (eZine) Directories such as www.jogena.com, www.directoryofezines.com. Carry out a search in Google for other Newsletter Directories.

6. Entice subscribers by giving them something of value in exchange for signing up. Write something original that they can’t get anywhere else, maybe a report or a Video.

7. Create an Image for your newsletter, give it a persona and use this image as part of your signup form.

8. Ask your current subscribers to pass on your email newsletter to others

9. Promote it for free using Classified Ads Sites such as the marketplace on Ecademy, Gumtree, Craigslist, even eBay now offers a classified ad format.

10. Use a co-registration process. Co-registration is a great way to build a list. Basically your newsletter advert will appear on other companies websites and their visitors will have the ability to add themselves to your list while signing up to others.

11. Use an Exit Window. An exit window usually pops up when visitors leave your site. Why not build a pop up window with a signup form to your newsletter. Maybe add some different text such as “Wait before you go…”. Yes, this could annoy some people but if pop ups annoy visitors they will have pop up blockers so they won’t even see them. Create different windows for different exit points on your site.

12. List Exchanges. There are websites you can signup to and promote that build a mailing list using MLM techniques. The more people that signup under you the bigger of a list you are building. Some of the best sites include www.yourluckylist.com and www.listinferno.com

13. Ask people that you network with. If you are a business card swapper and networker ask if you can add them to your list so they can receive your newsletter. have a signup link to your newsletter on the back of your card. BUt keep the url simple!

14. Add a signup up advert or line to your email signature block and make sure it goes out on ALL your emails.

15. Use a Hover Ad or Pop Up ad on your sites homepage to collect email signups.

16. Make sure your newsletter has its own page on your site so visitors can read back issues or get more detailed information about what your newsletter will offer them.

17. Make sure you have a link to your newsletter page from your homepage and include it in your main site navigation.

18. Write and submit articles (See my previous article on article marketing) and include a signup link

19. Run a contest or quiz on your site to capture email addresses.

I think that this will be enough to be getting on with. There are hundreds of different techniques you can employ. Buildig a targeted mailing lost no matter how big or small can lead to increased profits.  Add to this, autoresponders and automated mailing systems and you can increase the lifetime value of a customer pretty much on autopilot.

Sometimes Internet Marketing can be frustrating. For most as soon as you have built your new website, you want it to appear in Google! After all this is where the money and traffic is supposed to be. But how come my site isn’t showing up and Google doesn’t know I exist?

It would be easy to go to Google, find the submit url link and then site back and wait. And wait you will.

It appears that directly telling Google your site is live doesn’t do you any favours and means that your site gets added to a list of sites for the Google spider to crawl.

But the Google spider is off crawling and spidering the web so who knows when it will be back to base to get a new set of orders.

So what do you do? If telling Google isn’t going to work quickly for me then what do I do?

The answer is to raise flags around the Web so the Google spider “stumbles” into your site and will then not need to wait until it returns to base. You can easily tell where the Google Spider is going to be on any given day. You know it will be at high traffic, high content sites crawling and indexing all the new content that gets uploaded every hour of every day, so raising your flags on those kinds of sites will help no end. Here are 5 ways you get Google to spider your site quickly.

Articles
Write a 300-500 word article about your sites major topic. Go to www.ezinearticles.com and register for a free author account, then submit your article. You will be presented with the option of adding a resource box. In this box, you can add a link to your website. This is the one of the best ways of alerting Google and the other search engines that your site exists.

Press Release
Write a press release promoting your new site or a new service and submit it for free to www.pressbox.co.uk (This is a free publicity site where you can submit your release too) This site gets visited by Google daily and it won’t take long for them to find your site if it is listed here.

Classified Ads
Write a small 25 – 50 word Classified Ad and add a link to your site then submit it to the relevant city / town on Gumtree.com, Craigslist.org, and Vivastreet.co.uk. These sites are visited by Google and the other engines two or three times a day. Your site will be listed within around 48 hours

Blogging
Pay a successful blogger to blog about you and your business. There are lots of good highly respected bloggers that pimp site reviews for cash! The benefits of this for you is two fold. One you get links from a normally high ranking website, and secondly you could get lots of traffic directly as people reading the review will visit your site. One of the more respected Bloggers in internet Marketing is John Chow and he has written site reviews. The other way would be to find a post on some of these sites and write a useful and informative post and include a link back to your site.

Web Profile
If you have an Facebook/LinkedIn/Ecademy account – make sure you have added a link to your website from your profile. If you have other profile pages in other websites use these too. Myspace, Yahoo!, Your eBay About Me Page, Linked In, FastPitch, or Business Scene profile to name a couple.

1MonthLoan is a leading payday loan company. 1Monthloan are themselves the lender which brings improved communication and help with the application process. We lend £75 – £750 for a period up to 31 days.

£25 paid for each deposited loan

Become a 1MonthLoan Affiliate

Affiliate Manager Contact Details

David Weaver
Affiliate Manager
dweaver@mis-sold.com

You spend lots of time, effort and probably money attracting people to your site. So what do you do about those that come in and leave straight away.

Do you just let them go? If you are, you are crazy. That would be like standing at the door of a shop and letting people stand at the door and look in and then hold the door for them as they leave with a big smile on your face!

What if I told you that you if you implemented a few simple strategies on your website you could monetise these visitors. In fact, you could earn an income from ANY visitor, even the time wasters! Have I peaked your interest yet?

Now before we go on, I must confess the techniques I will recommend will not sound fantastic, and in fact they are quite ordinary but I ask you to have an open mind.

In 2003, I introduced these techniques to one of the largest Finance Sites in the UK. In fact, most now use it in some way shape or form. They didn’t really like the idea but I was quite persuasive and had them try it for 30 days. In the first 30 days they added £135,637 in EXTRA revenue with no impact on their other business activity. They worked out if they had implemented it at the bigging of the year they would have earned over £1 million in income from people leaving their site.

In 2004, they did just that, and in 2005 and last year they made changes to the service and rolled in out on ALL their websites and the income they earned went stratospheric! And the beauty is the more they sent in the front door, the more they earned from the back door.

So what are we talking about?

The Trusty pop up window. Before you scoff and leave, my finance client above hated pop ups too! Until it added £1 million worth of income to his bottom line that is. They were convinced they would get thousands of complaints. But guess what they didn’t get one.

Why?

Because in this day and age if someone doesn’t like pop ups they will have popup killers and toolbars ready to pounce so they will not even see them, yet there are enough people out there that still like popups as they can see a benefit in what they offer.

But!

I’m not talking about delivering adverts via popups when people visit the site. No No No. This is what gives Popups a bad rap!

These are popups with a difference, in fact, they should be called exit consoles!

I’m suggesting that you look at your site traffic statistics and look at the section entitled “Exit pages”. This will show you where you are leaking traffic. On these web pages add some code to deliver a popunder so that if someone leaves through that page they get a relevant exit console.

For example, if the page they were on was about Credit Cards, you could deliver a credit card related Exit Console.

What you put in that popped up window is key! Don’t just put in a banner ad or a advertisement! Give them something of value or use.

Why are they leaving? Because they didn’t find what they were looking for. So help them do that. Give them options. Open with something like…

“Sorry you did not find what you were looking for.”

This shows them you are trying to help and gives the visitor the impression that the resources being delivered are recommended.

Secondly, brand it like your site but don’t open it as a full window. Create a mini branded console. This tells them where this window has come from.

In this window, you can do lots of things but in the main, you want to try and direct them back to your site, get them to leave an email address, or give them a phone number so they can call you.

In my example above, they sent these visitors to their competitors.

Yes that right, they send all this traffic to their competitors and got paid for it! They realised that these visitors were going off to other sites anyways so why not earn from that fact.

For every click through from their exit console, they earned an commission for the click itself, they didn’t even need to worry about the partner converting the traffic to sales.

There are other clients that used their Exit Console to carry out customer research, build a maiing list, offer exclusive deals, drove traffic to their call centres and genreally earn an income from people that were leaving their website.

So if you have a high traffic or medium traffic site you could be generating a revenue from those that are leaving your site.

Obviously there is a bit more to it than that. But this article was just to get your thinking about the possibilities.

British Insurance provide a highly competitive range of insurance products to affiliates. Becoming a British Insurance affiliate is free of charge and there are no set-up costs.

Why choose British Insurance?

I am sure you are aware of British Insurance and our uncompromising dedication to excellence. We are a multi-award winning Insurance Provider and we are regularly recommended in all national newspapers, as well as radio and TV programmes such as:

• ‘Tonight’ with Sir Trevor McDonald;
• ‘GMTV’ with Martin Lewis;
• ‘Moneybox’;
• ‘Wake Up To Money’;
• and ‘The Money Programme’

Ultimately though, it is our highly skilled staff that defines British Insurance and differentiate us from our competitors; we only recruit the very best talent and we place them at your disposal.

How does the British Insurance affiliate program work?

Our online sales administration system enables you to promote our payment protection insurance product through your own unique link or code. This allows you to achieve maximum policy sales in a simple, straightforward manner, without any costs in terms of creating, updating or maintaining products. All applications are fully tracked, via unique tracking links, to ensure that all commission is correctly allocated. In addition, we provide full statistical information to ensure complete transparency between us and our affiliate partners.

Is there a good market for these products?

The UK payment protection insurance is huge and is worth in the region of £8 billion a year. The affiliate market is not saturated so now is a great time to run PPC campaigns in this growing online market place.

How much will I earn?

Commission is paid to you for as long as your affiliate agreement remains in force at the current rate of 20% of all nett premiums, which represents 66.67% of the total commission received by us.

How do I become a British Insurance Affiliate?

To become a British Insurance affiliate or to obtain further information simply complete the contact form and we will get back to you promptly with further details to enable you to sell our products online.

Become a British Insurance Affiliate

Insights is the monthly newsletter of Speedie Consultants, the finance and insurance content specialists. Each month, you will receive an insight into various tried and tested ways in which you can drive more traffic, generate more leads, and boost your exposure online.

By signing up, you will get ideas that you can implement on your own or have us do for you. The content is standalone, which means you can take the ideas and action them as soon as you like.

To give you a taste of the content that we will be sending you, here are some of our upcoming features:

• Running an Affiliate programme
• Mini Sites
• Sources of low cost traffic
• Blogging
• Local Search
• And much more…

By being an insights subscriber you will also receive special offers not available anywhere else on our range of services.

We will also be sending you details of other freebies that we offer including our range of Finance and Insurance calculators, and our 52 week internet marketing course.

To kick things off, by subscribing using the form below you will qualify for a free 20 minute consultation about your online marketing efforts and we will be able to give you actionable tips over the phone.