April Home Business Tips Newsletter

April 23rd, 2007

Subjects this month are:

1. New helpful category at CB Mall
2. Is this happening to you?
3. Have you given your website a “spring” cleaning?

CB Mall’s New Blog Category

CB Mall has created a new category that could be a great help to
you in creating or improving your blog(s). This new category is
located in the “Internet Marketing” section with the sub-category
of “Blog” related products.

As blogs are becoming an excellent marketing tool, more products
are becoming available on creating, using, and marketing with blogs.
You can check it out at http://tinyurl.com/2menhu

Is This Happening to You?

The biggest single issue for business-to-business marketers is
having an effective head generation according to recent studies.

It has been pointed out the eighty percent of marketing expenditures
on lead generation are wasted due to the leads being lost, ignored,
or discarded by sales people. 

Be sure you are dealing reputable companies if you are paying for
email advertising.

Does Your Website Need A “Spring Cleaning”?

Here are some suggestions from Yahoo on reviewing your website(s)
to obtain better results.

Feature seasonal specials. If you offer seasonal products and
services, be sure to feature them on your home page. “Having some
spring merchandise on the front page — either as specials or in the
right column or somewhere above the fold, where people don’t have
to scroll down to see it is a really good idea It shows the site is
fresh and up-to-date.

Clear away the cobwebs.  Adding some fresh content and moving
things around. Even though search engines use spiders, they don’t
like cobwebs. Your site may rank well, but if you don’t
do anything to it for ages, it will fall farther and farther down
in the rankings.
 
Get rid of the junk. This is a good time to review your site
content and get rid of the things that aren’t working for you.
Delete old products that aren’t selling well,

Update product descriptions, and get rid of references to “new”
products that aren’t new any more, and delete or archive outdated
news releases.

Find and repair your links. You can keep your site visitors from
becoming frustrated by dead links by running a monthly link check.
There are link-checking tools [such as W3C Link Checker] that you
can use, which make doing that a lot easier, some can spider and
check your site online, and you don’t even have to buy the tool.

Improve your grammar. Grammatical errors can make your site look
less professional and turn off your visitors. Are you using a good
spell check? This is important, too, More and more, Google’s
algorithm includes spelling and syntax. If you have a lot of poor
English on your site, the search engines might not consider you to
be an authoritative source.

Do your research. Everyone knows that having the right keywords on
your site makes it easier for people to find you. Top keywords are
always changing, It’s important to conduct keyword research and
update your keywords at least once a year.

Freshen your colors. Adding seasonal colors and images is a simple
way to freshen the look of your site.  Choose colors that
complement your brand. There are automated scripts that can change
your websites colors with each season.

Update your dates. If the pages on your site include “last updated”
footnotes, make sure they are as current as possible.

And here are some suggestions for making your content and images
more accessible for visitors:

Break it up. Your site content should be easily to scan. Edit your
page content and incorporate lots of white space. Break it up into
easily scanned “chunks,” so it’s more readable.

Speed things up. More Internet visitors now have high-speed
broadband connections, so it’s less of an issue than in the past.
However, it’s still important to make sure that your web pages are
quick to load. Tools such as NetMechanic can help you compress
large graphics to speed up page loading.

So, start your spring season with a complete cleanup. You’ll
benefit with better search rankings, happier customers, and more
sales.

To your success,

Tim Smith