Instead, I recommend you take a look at Salesautomator.com, which is a white label version of 1Shoppingcart.com but don’t be fooled into thinking it is only for e-commerce sites. You can get a month’s free trial with all the features but at the end of the month you can just opt for the AutoResponder service, which is very economical when compared to other popular options, unless you are pessimistic about the size you will be able to grow your list to.

What I mean is, you can start AWeber for $19 monthly (after you $1 trial ends) but that only lets you have a maximum of 500 subscribers. SalesAutomator starts at $29 monthly (after your FREE trial) which allows you to build your list to 10,000 subscribers. $29 a month with AWeber gets you 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 would cost you $69 monthly.

In my experience I have no complaints about either service – ease of use and email deliverability are good with both so in my opinion it comes down to whether you believe you will be around long enough to accumulate more than 500 subscribers.

When you publish an article offering your expertise with a link to your sales page or website you can, over time, develop a following and be seen as an expert in your field. What you don’t have time for, once you’ve published your articles, is for the world to find you. You want to make a sale. You need traffic to your articles to make that sale, and that is where bookmarking comes in.

Bookmarking your articles requires that you show bookmarking sites – websites where authors can post article topics and links to their articles – a title, a little teaser about your article, keywords and often an authors biography. While you can sit in front of your computer and do this all day with the many bookmarking sites out there, manually putting in information for every article you publish, the fast and easy way to do this is with an automated bookmarking software package. These slick tools let you enter your article information in once and in an instant bookmarking sites are told where to find your words of wisdom, your latest tips or “how to” suggestions. No longer do you need to manually feed information into bookmarking sites, the software does it for you with the press of a button.

Since article marketing has become so popular there have been several companies that have come out with bookmarking software programs. Here is what you need to know before you invest in one, however, as all bookmarking programs are definitely not the same:

Are there any ongoing fees? Most bookmarking software programs have an upfront cost to download the program, but then they also charge you a monthly flat fee or a fee based on the number of times you use it. Stay away from the backend fees. It can get expensive fast.

Where does the software bookmark your articles? Some bookmarking sites are better than others, at least in the eyes of Google and other search engines. The lower quality sites are often discounted by search engines. You want your software to bookmark to only the highest quality bookmarking sites.

Does your software leave an untraceable footprint back to you? If you put up a few articles and suddenly flood the bookmarking sites with information you could get banned when they see the information coming from one author. Smart programs cloak your submissions so your information arrives anonymously.

Is the program you are considering truly automatic? You want software that gets around captcha boxes found on many bookmarking sites. You also want it to set up your account automatically so you do not have to spend hours doing this. “Automatic” really doesn’t live up to its name if you have to tend to it constantly. You also don’t want a program that is complicated to set up. If it is, you might as well have manually submitted all of your article information.

Good, automatic bookmarking programs are really promising and can dramatically boost your traffic. Keep in mind these simple guidelines when looking for a program and you’ll enjoy fast traffic, easy marketing and increased sales.

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Keyword research tools will give you long lists of keywords that you can target but you will only find out which ones will result in a positive response to what you are offering if you test. You might think that you already know which keywords will bring in the cash, and you might be right, but what if you are wrong. Hours, maybe even days or weeks, of wasted effort targeting traffic that will never give you a return. There is no substitute for testing, no shortcut, no secret pill. And how do you get the traffic to test the profitability of different keywords? That depends on how quick you want to know the results.

When I need to know the answer quickly, which is almost always the case, I use Adwords. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money and, if your instincts are anywhere near right, you should be able to make a return on your testing or at least cover your costs. If you can’t at least generate a small return before you use up your testing budget (for me that is normally $30-$40 per campaign), you need to move on. Why? Because, even if you eventually get free traffic to those keywords you won’t earn anything so don’t waste your time. If you break even on certain keywords they can still generate a decent income in the future when the traffic is free, so they are Cash Keywords, worth investing your time and SEO efforts in.

That does not mean that working with other webmasters for your mutual benefit is a bad thing or that there is no SEO benefit to be gained. The one thing that you should always bear in mind is that, if the visitor benefits, so does the site. This is the theme I shall be writing on over the next few days, so subscribe to my feed or watch out for my Twitter updates if you want to learn how you can get good mileage out of genuine reciprocal linking arrangements with other sites in your market.

Anyway this should have fixed it. I don’t like having 404s.

To make this a useful post I could point out that I found this 404 error by looking in my Google Webmaster Tools under the “Crawl Errors” section. If you don’t have a Google Webmaster Account I recommend you get one here www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

In order to maintain control of my domain registrations, I have one email address that I use solely for this purpose. As anyone who has had a domain name registered for more than a few months will know, domain registrars send out emails periodically to all registered owners, asking them to confirm or update their registration details in order to comply with ICANN regulations and maintain current, accurate registration data.

The emails that are sent out are worded in an official way and carry a link to the registrar’s website so that the domain registrant can check their details and amend if necessary. Once you have seen a few of these, it is almost a reflex to just click the link and confirm the details, especially if you know they haven’t changed. There are always more important things to do, so it is just another admin task that can be dealt with quickly and then forgotten. Not any more.

Over the years I have registered domains with various different registrars, both for myself and for my clients. As more competition entered the domain registration market, prices have fallen and I have tested most of them out, not only for price, but also for ease of maintenance and customer service. Although most of my domains are now centralized in one of my two favorite registrar accounts at GoDaddy.com and NameCheap.com, I still have a few scattered round at Network Solutions, Tucows and country specific registrars like 123-Reg in the UK and Hostinet in Spain.

This week, as usual, emails arrived to my domains@ email account asking me to confirm my registration details. All I can say is, thankfully, I was on the ball. It has now become a habit for me to check the information that pops up when I hover over a link in an email, in order to confirm that the link actually goes where it says it is going, before I click on it. I consider this a good habit and I do it faithfully every time, regardless of how professional or genuine the email looks.

So far this week I have received scam emails purporting to be from Enom.com (NameCheap.com’s registrar) and Network Solutions. I have no doubt that over the next few days I shall receive more emails that claim to be from other registrars and I shall be on my guard, as you should be if you have domains registered. Just like the Bank phishing emails, it is easy to spot a fake one when you know you don’t have an account with that institution but when you get one from “your bank” it is tempting to just check it out.

So, webmasters and website owners, be warned. You will still be getting genuine ICANN compliance emails but before you click on any link in any email check it out. The phishing emails will display a link that looks like www.myregistrar.com but the underlying shortcut will take you to something like www.myregistrar.com.update08.cn. Anything that appears after the .com should immediately ring alarm bells. If you have the time, contact your registrar and inform them of the email you received and they will provide you an email address where you can forward the bogus message so that they can try to trace the sender from the header information.

© Andy Smith 2008

Firstly, phrases like “anchor text” and “link popularity” are normally associated with off-page SEO efforts like getting links from other sites and making sure the text that links to your site is relevant to the content of the page on your site that the link points to. What is too often overlooked is the fact that these considerations are just as important when it comes to internal linking and the page structure within your own website. A large part of onpage SEO revolves around contextual linking between the various pages of your site. A relevant text link is a vote for that page, even if it comes from another one of your own pages.

Secondly, when it comes to local search, where your geographical location plays an important part in defining your target market, onpage optimisation can often be enough on its own to secure a good SERP ranking. Strategically placing geographical keywords, like towns, cities, counties, states and provinces, throughout the pages of your site can establish you as a dominant authority in your local marketplace.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I’m sure I don’t need to point out that offpage optimisation can often be really hard work. Offpage promotion predominantly comes down to getting quality backlinks to your site from other sites on the Internet. If your page contains keywords that relate to the anchor text used in the incoming link it helps the Search Engines to establish that your page deserves to be treated as an authority for the keywords you have optimised your page for. If your page has not been given any onpage optimisation you will almost certainly need more incoming links to achieve the same results.

So, I think it is fair to say that, a little bit of time spent on optimising your pages as you create them, can save you a lot of time and effort later, when you are trying to promote them. Onpage optimisation might not have the same power or influence as a link from a top authority site in your market but it is still definitely worth the effort when establishing a solid overall SEO strategy for your site. Ignore it at your peril.

© Andy Smith 2008

The Google Keyword Research Tool, which many of you will already be familiar with, is now able to produce very usable output in a wide range of foreign languages. You can access the Google Keyword Tool in Spanish (Herramienta para palabras clave) here and can change to just about any language when you are inside.

My personal experience with foreign SEO is limited to Spanish but my research indicates that other nationalities are also finding it easier to achieve good results by applying only basic on-page SEO strategies coupled with a limited amount of link promotion. I am sure that as time goes on it will become as competitive as it is in English but for the time being, “any SEO is better than none”, will go a long way in foreign language search results.