I have a short ebook that I’ve been selling for a little over a year now.  I started out selling it on eBay, but after a while I decided that wasn’t working — in addition to how time consuming it was to list the ebook, answer questions, and deal with individual sales, "feeBay" was taking almost 40 percent of the income I got from it, once you considered listing fees, final value fees, and PayPal fees.

So I decided to go it on my own.  I set up a subdomain on my regular website and created a sales page for my ebook.  I also created a PayPal payment button and a way to download the book after payment had been made.  Now the only bite out of my profit was PayPal’s fees, but there was no way around that.

The problem, however, was how to sell the ebook now that I didn’t have hundreds of eBayers browsing my listings every day.  Because there wasn’t much online on the subject, my job should be pretty easy.  Still, to get a higher search engine ranking I decided to try some article marketing.

Article marketing is where you write and submit free expert articles on subjects related to your business.  Although you don’t get paid for the articles, they help your business by establishing you as an expert, funneling referral traffic your way, and boosting your search engine ranking.  Because they build link popularity by creating many URL and contextual links back to your website, they are also an important part of many link building campaigns.  In fact, many a search engine marketing company uses this approach.

Unfortunately, article marketing is also very time consuming, which is why it’s not uncommon for a small business owner to find an Internet marketing service to do this kind of thing for them.  I found this out the hard way: I finished only eight marketing articles before giving up, and haven’t written any since.

Technorati Tags: article marketing, higher search engine ranking, link building campaigns, contextual links, search engine marketing company, Internet marketing service

I recently had the opportunity to interview an SEO expert about his work. I didn’t realize until the interview was complete that I’d held a bunch of preconceived notions about what type of person might provide professional SEO services. Although I knew that SEO was something done by almost all online businesses, I’d expected someone who was an expert in the topic to be working at a technological level that was beyond my own brain. What happened, of course, was that I met someone who had a thorough understanding of SEO but who was otherwise exactly like you or I.

The individual who runs an SEO company is really more knowledgeable about business and marketing than about technology per se. Although the marketing is applied to the world of the Internet, the work is designed to increase attention to websites. This is done through following algorithms that are set up by search engines. However, it’s rooted in basic marketing practices. For example, this particular expert told me that the basic rule of SEO is really the "I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine" mentality of social networking.

And he told this to me in simple language that I could understand. As we wrapped up the interview, I realized that my assumptions about this expert underlined assumptions that I held about the difficulty of SEO. After the interview was complete and I’d realized how mistaken these assumptions were, I became much more open to the idea of learning how to implement some basic SEO on my own site.

Technorati Tags: SEO expert, SEO company, professional SEO services

Free templates are something that you can download from the Internet and use to make the appearance of your website more visually appealing. Although anybody with a website can benefit from these templates, there are certain groups that get more out of their use than others.

Here are three groups that benefit from using free templates:

• New bloggers. There are thousands of new blogs launched each day. Many of those are set up by people without a lot of blog knowledge who still want their site to stand apart from the others. Using downloaded templates and the assistance of a template forum, this is a possibility.
• Small business owners. New small businesses don’t have the resources to hire professional web designers. Using templates and web design tutorials, they can do it themselves.
• Students. Students can benefit from learning basic web design skills no matter what field they’re studying. Templates are a good start to getting that education.

Businesses of any size and bloggers at any level can benefit from improving their websites using templates found online. But small businesses, new bloggers and students are the groups which get the most out of using these templates because they have the most to gain from getting good design at no cost.

Technorati Tags: free templates, template forum, web design tutorials

There is something interesting that you might find online if you’re starting to look at setting up a new website. There are web hosting domain coupons available online. Some of these are offered by the web host and are available through a variety of sites. Others are the result of a special deal between a website and a specific web host. Should you consider using these coupons when you are setting up your website?

The main thing to keep in mind is that a good deal isn’t good if you don’t get what you need out of it. Before looking at coupons, you should figure out what you need from your web host. Do you want vps hosting or database hosting? How much bandwidth does your site require? What types of e-commerce options are you going to need to implement? Make these decisions before choosing a web host in order to avoid getting tempted into a deal that’s not right for you.

Once you’ve narrowed down your needs, you can begin looking at the pricing options that are available to you. In some cases, a coupon can cut your costs. In other cases, it’s going to provide you with an initial deal but will result in later monthly costs down the line. Read the fine print and make wise selections so that you can save money while getting the site hosting that you need.

Technorati Tags: web hosting domain, vps hosting, database hosting