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28 Oct 09 How Sam Built a Gigantic E-mail List

Sam is a master list builder who at times goes haywire, but most of the he is on track. Building e-mail list is one of those things in which Sam never go awry. In this post, I will explain the 4-step process Sam uses to build his huge e-mail lists that he further uses to sell his products.

Step 1: Create a hook and duplicate is umpteen times

If you want to pull people to enter their e-mail IDs and submit the form on your website then you will have to push quality freebies down their throat. I am not suggesting buying them a beer. Just offering free videos, e-book, how-to guide or podcast will be enough. Create one hook for you niche and make many copies of the niche and put it at strategic location on the web (pond), and wait for fish to take the bait.

Step2: Spread the word

Let as many people on the Internet know as you can. Use all possible channels to spread word about the wonderful freebie that you are offering.

Step 3: Create a Landing page

Create a simple landing page that may ask for the visitors name and address while making a promise to give access to the freebies once they have entered their mail ids and names. Do not make this page long, and keep the form above the fold of the website.

Step 4: Follow up

As soon as you get the mail IDs you were seeking, send a mail to their IDs with a link to the freebie. Write a small mail describing your purpose. You can also send a “thanks for downloading” mail once your visitor is done downloading the freebie.

This is a proven way to build huge mailing lists. You should replicate this step whenever you need to build mailing lists.

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09 Sep 09 SEO Simplified: What to Do to Rank in Google, Part – II

“Hey, how are you doing?”

All set to learn how Google wants your website to be in order to make it rank better? Without wasting any time, let’s get started. In this blog post, we will talk about Google’s take on content and design of your website.

Design and content guidelines

  • Always remember to link all the pages within the website properly. Broken links are not looked upon with kindness. Each page of your website should be reachable from at least one static link. I recommend having an HTML site map for that.
  • Google has an agenda. It wants to help visitors, and hence it has set a rule that says: a website should have a site map that will hold links to all the important pages on the website. If the numbers of links exceed 100 then consider breaking the site map into pages.
  • Do not create just a keyword-rich site. It will not take you anywhere. Google and even yahoo and Bing want to add to the visitors’ experience; hence, you are required to create a well structured site that adds value to the user by providing relevant information. No duplicate content.
  • Use keywords at appropriate places, so that users can reach your page upon searching the used keywords.
  • Use text in links, names or important contents. If you have to use image then supply Alt tag because Google cannot read images.
  • Make Title tag and Alt tag descriptive. They matter a lot for Google.
  • Remove broken links and unnecessary codes from your HTML.
  • Keep the parameter of dynamic pages short. Search engine crawlers find it hard to index dynamic contents. Hence, go for static contents, if you can.
  • Do not clutter any page with too many links. Keep the page readable for human.

Follow these guidelines and your site will be in the good book of Google. In the next post, we will talk about technical guidelines.

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02 Sep 09 SEO SIMPLIFIED: Do Not Allow Hotlinking

Yes. Do not allow hotlinking on your website.

Why?

Let’s tell you other names by which hotlinking goes, then perhaps you will know why. Hotlinking is also called direct linking, piggy-backing, offsite image grabs leeching, and bandwidth theft.

Got the idea?

All these terms stand for the attempt a webmaster makes to steal your bandwidth. Actually, what many webmasters do is this: he or she will use an image or any other object from your website in one or more article on his or her website just by adding a direct link to the image or object on your site or server, thus stealing your bandwidth.

How?

Well, let’s say, X has used a file called image.jpg in one of the articles on his website by providing a direct link to the file that is hosted on your server (http://www.yoursite.com/content/images/image.jpg). Now, when a visitor visits his website to read that article, his server sends a request to your server for image.jpg, whose URL is placed in that article, and thus the article on X’s website displays the image.

Suppose the size of image (image.jpg) is 20kb, so when one visitor read X’s article, you lose 20kb of bandwidth to X. If X gets just one visitor per month than there is nothing to worry, but what if he got 1000 daily visitors? You will lose 20,000kb (around 20mb) of bandwidth daily, and what if he has 100,000 visitors daily? You will lose 20,000,000kb (around 2gb) of bandwidth daily.

This is serious, isn’t it?

How to prevent Hotlinking?

Well, it is hard to prevent hotlinking to your resources, but you can try doing it by modifying .htaccess and writing mod-rewrite, if you are using Apache web server.

The .htaccess rule that you will set to prevent hotlinking will look like this:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?yoursite.com/.*$ [NC]

RewriteRule .(pdf)$ – [F,NC]

Well, if you are thinking of hotlinking to others’ resources then wait for a day, tomorrow I will tell you why you should avoid hotlinking to other website.

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