According to latest Facebook figures over 500 million people are. That’s 1 in 13 of the world’s population! (source: BBC Website).

Look at the graph below; sure it’s a steady rise in users.

But wait look at the time scale along the bottom, it’s not linear. Look at the first three bars, growth of around 20 million users over three years. Now look at the last two bars a growth of some 100 million users over six months.

This growth in Social Networking re-enforces the assertion made in another article I read recently “Why is traditional advertising dead?”

In this article Jim Boulton, Deputy MD of Story Worldwide suggests that users are becoming immune to blatant in their face adverts that just push the product in their face. To succeed now the advert needs to be more engaging. One approach is to tell a story. Look at the series of BT Broadband ads on TV; will Jane and Adam ever get married? Another, that the Internet lends its self to perfectly, is to provide interaction by letting your users take part, by running polls, asking for directions etc.

Better still do both. Blogging allows you to tell stories about your business, perhaps share success stories or give examples of how your business has helped customers. These examples tell stories, if you allow readers to leave comments it also allows interaction by providing the opportunity for you, and others, to take part in a two way conversation.

This is the sort of social interaction that Facebook’s growth proves people want today.

A link in simple terminology is just like how many folks recognize you or linked with you inside your society or globally.

Whilst we talk about a site, here a link stands for how many websites are linked with your website. Correct link exchanges can be a significant factor in acquiring a good search engine ranking and also known as an off-page SEO technique.

You’ll be able to link your website with different sites by placing a link within their site or by putting the links of other peoples websites in your own sites. The following are a few common techniques utilized for link exchanges or link popularity:

One way linking, Two way linking, Three way linking or Reciprocal linking which option should you use on your websites.

There are two types of links which we could acquire through link exchanges, the first one of all is a superior link and the second one is a quantity link.

Superior Link: acquiring a link inside a quality website, which is having extremely relevant content and as well a good Page Rank, is called a quality link. 10 quality links are a lot more beneficial then 50 quantity links.

Quantity Link: Quantity links are links which you will be able to get easy through the free directories, unsuitable websites and free link directories. Quantity links are not as good as quality links.

Below are a few major things to keep in mind when exchanging links:

1. The sites with who you exchange links with should be extremely relevant to your site.
2. Websites should be unique in addition to having good content which is relevant too.
3. Websites should not have more than 20 links on that particular page on which your link will be shown.
4. The link page ought to be indexed in Google and in all additional major search engines too.
5. The link page ought to be cached in Google and in all additional major search engines as well.
6. The link should directly go to your site in stead of through any extra redirection technique.
7. Your links anchor text ought to be a little bit descriptive in stead of merely containing a single keyword.
8. Your hypertext or links anchor text should be meaningful and should apply a suitable knowledge about your site or service.
9. Your links title ought to be followed by a meaningful and positive site description.
10. Attempt to avoid linking through software it will be better if performed manually.

Always try to acquire quality links rather than quantity links, whenever your sites link is placed in a good quality website is passes on more importance to your website. Because as far as search engine rankings are concerned the off-page SEO is the most crucial boosting element for your website.

Therefore, try for quality links to make your site more popular in addition to making it more visible for Internet users.

Author Resource:-> Article Written By: Tom Dahne

Tom Dahne is also the owner of the very popular Link Directory that invites webmasters to submit their sites for review and inclusion for free in Link Directory, visit http://www.linkdirectory.com and http://www.bidonlinks.net

Article From Articles Free UK

When planning your first small business website, there are three essential questions you should ask yourself:

1. Who is your target audience?
2. How will your target audience find you?
3. How will you convert your visitors into sales?

These questions sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many people don’t bother…and then moan that “our website doesn’t bring us any business”.

1) Who is your target audience?

Give a great deal of thought to your target market. Who do you want to attract to your website? Why? The answer to that is more than likely to sell them something – a product, a service, or an idea perhaps.

Claiming that your market is anyone and everyone is far too vague, and your website will lack focus, and fail to maximise its potential. Ideally you should be aiming to create a niche.

2) How will they find you?

Creating a niche will also help you with the search engines, and drive hot leads to your site.

Consider what keywords your target market might type into a search engine to find you. Actually do the searches yourself. Who comes up in the top 30? Because that’s where you need to be. Are your competitors there? Look at their sites. Do they work? How can you improve on them? Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.

Those keywords – or keyphrases to be more accurate – need to be incorporated into your pages of your site – in the page titles, in the headings, and in the internal links.
Be specific with your keyphrases. They will be less competitive than the more general single word searches, and will more accurately target your market. You may have to localise or specialise to get in that top 30 – and the top 30 is where you need to be to drive traffic to your site. As I am sure you are aware from your own experience, if you haven’t found what you are looking for in the first 3 results pages, you look elsewhere.

The key to achieving high search engine rankings is building inbound links to your web pages – that is pages on external websites that link to pages on your site. Crucially this link acquisition should be a natural growth – where inbound link count increases at a gradual pace. The pages that link to yours should be relevant, on-topic and ideally contain the same keywords – especially in the linking text. Search engines rank pages based upon their reputation – your ranking will be determined by what other (preferably high ranking) pages say about your page.

3) How will you convert your visitors into sales?

Don’t just tell them what you do or sell. Tell them why they want it (yes, want – not need). Offer incentives, freebies, discounts – anything to get that dialogue started.

Current research indicates that the human brain makes a judgment about a web page within a twentieth of a second! That doesn’t leave you very long to make an impression. So, make sure that you have your Unique Selling Point (USP) clearly visible on your home page – and preferably prominent on every one of your other pages. After all, it’s not a given that the home page will be the first page that the visitor sees, particularly if they have found you via a search engine.

Then make sure that you list your bullet-pointed guarantees. Visitors have to understand why you are different from the rest, and why they should deal with you and not your competitors. And as we’ve discovered, they have to understand this pretty much instantly.

Lastly, make sure that your site has a funnel-like structure. Identify your important pages – usually the “call to action” or purchase pages – and make sure all roads lead to those pages. Your internal links – like their external equivalents – should describe the target page. If you sell blue widgets, don’t call your products page “Products”, call it “blue widgets”, and make sure that the links pointing at this page also say “blue widgets”. This will not only help the search engines identify and rank the most important pages in your site, it will also lead your visitor to that all important conversion.

High quality sells its self. Oh no it doesn’t! Give me a good salesman over a good product anytime!

You can have the best picture, hotel, jewellery (name your own) in the world, if no-one knows about it you aren’t going to sell it. A statement of the obvious I know, but one worth making. Quality on its own just doesn’t cut it in sales.

But you know this don’t you, that’s why you want a website, to promte your product or service.

Unfortunately this isn’t just true of your base product, it’s true of your website too.

Your website exists to promote your product/business. But what about promoting your website? Just putting up a website and waiting for people to come won’t work. You wouldn’t open a new shop and just sit back waiting for passers by to notice your new shop, why so with your website?

You may have a super well designed website compliant with all the latest standards for accessibility etc, but if nobody knows that it exists no-one will come.

Submitting your new website to all the search engines in the world won’t do it either.

Like all of your other marketing you have to work at it.

Trawl the web yourself, ask as many appropriate website as you can to provide links to your website. They may well require reciprocal links, that’s o.k. Some may require a fee, you’ll obviously need to make a judgement call here as to how busy their website is and how many of their visitors are likely to be interested in your link.

Whilst you want as many inbound links to your website as you can get, they want to be good links, that is links from relevant sites. There really is limited value having a link from a site about vegetarianism to a butcher website!

The task continues offline too. Make sure that you include your web address on all of your offline material, stationary, business cards, adverts, flyer’s etc.

Monitor you web statistics if you can. See where visitors are comeing from and look for more sites like this to try and get more links. Look at the search terms they used and hone you page content to fit in with what people are looking for when they visit your website (see my post on Social Networking for Websites).

Keeping your website popular and attractive visitors that will buy your products or services is an ongoing task just like the rest of your marketing efforts.

Good Luck.

The first thing you have to know about your website is that it’s not about you!

Well o.k. it might be about you, a bit, but the important point in the context if this discourse is that it is not FOR you.

All too often people build a website to suit their own personal tastes and desires. If the site is a business website then this is a big mistake as most visitors to your site won’t be interested in you and your tastes, rather they’re interested in themselves and what they want.

The Internet is a very self serving space, if a visitor doesn’t see something that meets their interest straight away on your website in a single click they can be off somewhere else and you’ve lost them.

Even if you do grab a visitors initial interest if, once they start to read your content, they find a text that is all about you (or your business) written from your point of view they will quickly lose interest.

Now that isn’t to say that your website shouldn’t literally be about you or your business. Indeed there would be little point in having your own website if it wasn’t. Rather it is that you must present yourself or your business from the users point of view.

So you have to imagine yourself as one of your sites visitors, what do they want? What do they like?

It is the age old marketeers maxim: Present benefits not features.

Consider these two ways of telling site visitors that your accommodation has the largest rooms in Orkney.

“We have the most spacious comfortable rooms in Orkney”.

“You will enjoy the space and comfort of the largest rooms in Orkney”.

See what I mean. It’s about the visitor, in this case both website and business, not the vendor.

Similarly it can be easy to get carried away with trendy flashing graphics, slideshows and any other assortment of animated bells and whistle (speaking of which, I’ll elaborate on why you should probably not include sound on your website later).

Unless you’re a web or graphics designer, specifically showing of your skill at producing these features, these features should be used sparingly if at all.

As before ask yourself if the inclusion of a given feature will make your website better or easier to use for your visitor.

Don’t get me wrong the occasional bit of window dressing can liven up a website, just ask yourself critically if it is an improvement to the page or just a distraction.

If the answer is yes, then go with it.

I said I’d come back to music/sounds. We’ve all had that experience I’m sure where you surfing the world wide web following links from one website to the next as you explore items/subject that catch your interest to suddenly get blown out of your chair by a website with loud background music that you didn’t ask for an weren’t expecting.

It really is very rare, unless your website is specifically music related, that instant background music is desirable. I have implemented websites that include audio, but it is always best to invite the visitor to play the audio rather than just throw it at them whether they want it or not.

Back to where we started, forget that it’s about what your visitors wants at your peril. When I visit a website that makes me jump out of my skin I just hit the back button. I’m sure most do. How many take the trouble to turn down their PCs speakers to return and how many just go somewhere else. You’ll never know.

Looking at the website http://www.buygb.co.uk it is clearly in its infancy, but they are inviting enquiries/submissions from people/businesses that produce their own products.

As a few of my websites are for local craftsmen/producer I thought this might be of interest. Could be an alternative outlet or at least publicity channel for your business.

Is yours like this? I know, you’re too busy. The emails come in and join the already endless list. It’s so daunting.

Let me share with you my approach.

My e-mail inbox is generally empty.

It’s not because I’m a Billy No Mates! I don’t have an aggressive Spam filter. Nor do I just blindly delete all my mail.

I check my mail very regularly during my working day and deal with every email straight away. I have analysis software on my email reader that tells me my average response time to emails is 1 hour and 13 minutes.

Now service is very important to me and part of my reputation that I value most. But that isn’t why my response time is so low or why I deal with my emails straight away.

No, it’s part of a more fundamental approach to running my business and indeed life.

I suppose the nearest recognised system I would my approach to is the Getting Things Done work-life management system originated by David Allen.

Now if this is all sounding a bit heavy, bear with me it’s not.

Fundamentally it is about removing clutter, be it on the desk, in your mailbox or most of all in your mind.

The last item may seem a bit airy fairy bit trust me it isn’t. Your mind is cluttered when you are trying to keep track of too many things, many of them often very minor, to be able to focus on what has to be done and when. I’ll maybe come back to this later or in another post.

Back to the mail box…

We all get junk mail, even with a Spam filter. Simple just delete it. Do it straight away, don’t leave it there to clutter up your inbox. Of course its isn’t all malicious Spam, but either way if you don’t want it and you don’t need to reply to it, just delete it. This takes seconds, less, and at a stroke will clear much of your clutter.

The next step involves a little preparation, but this only needs to be done once.

If you already have folders set up to group your mails by say, customer, then you’re already half way there.

Create new folders for each customer, finally add to these one called deferred and one called newsletters (you don’t need this last one if you’re not subscribed to any newsletters).

Now back to your mailbox again.

If you do get newsletters and there are any in your inbox, give them a quick scan and then either read them, delete them, or move them to the newsletters folder you created earlier.

Now we’re just left with “genuine” emails. Scan each one and deal with them appropriately. Really, very often, most of them can be dealt with there and then.

Maybe they’re just for you information. If so, job done, you’ve read it, now either move it to the customer’s folder if you need to keep a copy, or just delete it.

Maybe they require some action, if this will take less than five minutes (perhaps just a quick reply) juts do it. Again, job done, now you can also file or delete the email.

Perhaps the email requires more involved action, that can’t be dealt with straight away.

Now we come to one of the nice features of Outlook. Drag the email onto the Tasks bar, this will create a new task with a copy of the email in the task description. Now you can set start and due dates for this task, allowing you to plan ahead when you intend to deal with this emails action requirements. You can even set a reminder. The real trick here is to be realistic about when and how you intend to complete this action.

So now you’ve got yourself a task set up, possibly with a reminder, for this email. Just fire of a quick reply to the email saying that you will get back to them by whatever time you’ve decided and then file it in the appropriate folder.

Last ones are the ones that don’t require any action, nor need to be saved. Examples of these might be despatch notifications for things you’ve ordered online. You’ll want to keep these until the goods arrive (in case they don’t), but once the goods do arrive they can be deleted. Just move these to the deferred folder you created earlier.

So there you have it.

Welcome to the empty inbox.

This has turned out to be a rather longer post than I intended, but I do hope that you embrace the philosophy. Having an empty inbox really is quite liberating. In its self it won’t change your life but it is one less thing to have to think about.

Working this way does requires some self discipline and some ongoing maintenance but I suppose this was the real payoff for me in that it planted the seed of a whole way of working. More on that in another post…

We all want our website to be well placed on search sites such as Google. Popularity for websites is much akin to popularity in real life.

In the battle for top position in the Search Engines maybe we can learn from the practice of good social networking.

Consider a party. One chap is twittering on about his super business, house, car etc. He’s name dropping in every other sentence and everyone is giving him a wide berth desperately trying not to get caught in the conversation. Nobody wants to listen to this bore.

Contrast this to the chap that is engaging everyone he meets in interesting conversation. He’s listening to what they’re saying and drawing people into the conversation with lively interesting and engaging chat. With the skill of a diplomat he weaves into the conversation, in an almost imperceptible way, the items that he wants people to take way from the conversation.

After the party everyone may well remember the bore but I bet they don’t know what he said. By contrast people will remember the words of the chap that engaged them in interesting conversation.

Everyone wants to figure prominently with search sites such as Google. Being popular for websites is very much like being popular in life.

People like interesting commentary, no-one likes blatant advertising.

Search engines love content, but it has to be useful and engaging content. Search engine are very smart now at differentiating between sensible relevant content and blatant repetitive advertising babble.

So, if you want to figure prominently in search engine results, make sure that your website has plenty of contextual, relevant content that is not just a list of blatant advertising phrases.

The Internet allows you to promote your business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

John Wright, the National Chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses in London, UK is also advocating the use of Internet marketing, PR and SEO to secure sales and increase revenue during a credit crunch recession.

“In a recent survey of members of the Federation of Small Business, nearly half of respondents said that advertising their business on the internet yielded an increase in sales by nearly one fifth, highlighting how important it is for a firm to have an online presence. The same survey showed that the number of small firms who had a website has leapt by a quarter to around 70 per cent over the past two years.

Turning to the internet can ensure small firms get the most out of their advertising and sales. Linking to other websites and using new technologies are among the most cost-effective ways of increasing sales and building brand awareness – especially during a downturn.”

Online advertising is the ideal ‘total media’ solution for advertisers in difficult economic times, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB Europe).

According to the UK Office of National Statistics, just under two-thirds of female internet users and nearly three-quarters of male internet users go online daily.

I’ve been playing around with WordPress quite a bit lately and just finished a website revision for AdventuraScotland who wanted to move to design where they could edit the site content themselves. They also wanted to have a Blog that they could use to report on their various activities as they happened. WordPress is the perfect tool for this.