I’ve seen the first Authority Blackbook in 2007 and I must say I was very much impressed with the depth of its contents when it comes to Web2.0 linkbuilding.

Now as a member of Social Power Linking, I received an advanced copy of Authority Blackbook 2008 edition from Jack Humphrey. This copy was not circulated to anyone else outside Authority Site Center members and the Social Power Linking group. I immediately read the ebook from cover to cover and consumed everything written on it in three hours. This ebook is said to be the most authoritative guide on the planet covering the best uses of Web2.0 technology, services, and software and I agree 100% on this claim.

The Authority Blackbook teaches how a site can attain an authority presence with a higher traffic volume as a result. It also discusses the tools and resources web2.0 marketers use to get buzz, rankings, and links from an assortment of web2.0 properties. It also serves as a great Web2.0 master tour guide as it makes the reader aware of the best places to show up and how they work to bring you serious traffic.

There is one warning, though, raised by Jack Humphrey. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. This is not a “walk in the park” kind of thing. The Authority Blackbook is a roadmap for people who are willing to make their online business their central focus, and not something they are going to work on “here and there” when they are in the mood.

When I first started blogging, I thought, you just need to post and ping, and that’s it. When I read the Authority Blackbook 2008, I learned that blog and ping is just the first step. You have to put in tags within your post and do trackbacks on related posts on other blogs. Not only that, you must also syndicate your post by submitting to social news media sites and social bookmarking sites.

There are also other more advanced techniques like submitting to rss feed and blog directories, video syndication and marketing (we are not only talking about youtube here), and podcasting (this term is not related to iPod, btw). Linkbuilding in the social marketing landscape involves a lot of work. There are only 24 hours in a day and that is not even enough to cover all the bases. That is why, you will find in the Authority Blackbook 2008 recommendations on the necessary and recommended tools to make the load lighter and make you work smarter.

The last part of the ebook is a huge listing of Web2.0 properties categorized and organized neatly. To the ordinary marketer, the playing ground is so much bigger now as compared to Web1.0. Many online marketers get intimated with Web2.0 and this ebook ensures that you get to understand Web2.0 marketing and help you to tap the limitless opportunities that exist in Web2.0.

Overall, Authority Blackbook 2008 is the most valuable “free” ebook on link building solely focusing on social marketing. The ebook refreshed some of the “old concepts” I learned in 2007 and introduced new techniques to give you an unfair advantage over the competition especially those people who have not embraced Web2.0 yet.

At Will2Design, you only don’t get a full-service web design team, you also get a website that delivers high quality traffic. Get your free copy of “The 33 things you need to know before choosing your website design team”.

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Creating a simple landing page for your website, shouldn’t be that difficult. Whatever your goal is, whether what you are trying to achieve is an increase in sales volume or the number of subscribers, you only need to follow certain specific rules to increase your conversion rates. Here’s a few pointers to help you get started in creating perfect landing pages that your potential customers will love.

1. Prerequisites and the tools of the trade

Have an autoresponder to help you in building relationships. with existing and potential customers and will result in gaining the trust of your subscribers and eventually getting future sales.

Collect the usual landing page graphics like headers, check-out buttons, wallpapers, and a picture of the theme of your landing page. If you are selling a dog training ebook, make sure you have some pictures about dogs positively reflecting the benefits that the customers will get once they download your ebook.

Subscribe to a payment processor like paypal, clickbank or 2checkout to process credit card payments.

Needless to say, you, also, need an actual product or service to offer that people would like to buy.

Personalize your landing page by having your own picture and a realistic signature. Studies have shown that having your picture and signature lead people to trust you more, influence their buying decisions later and increase your conversion rate.

2. Decide whether you would like to include a “squeeze page” to collect names and email addresses. This is an opt-in form where potential customers are usually invited to submit their information to receive some free ebooks, reports, training or promotional emails. The collected information are then fed to autoresponders to start the automated customer relationship building intended to gain more trust from your subscribers and explore future up-sell opportunities.

3. Plan your landing page theme – if you are getting traffic thru SEO, come up with phrases having high search volume but low number of competing web pages. Group similar phrases into a theme and create a landing page for each group using those phrases. Similarly do the same thing if you are doing PPC by including your PPC keywords into your landing pages.

4. Based on the theme, write the content of your landing page with a compelling sales points sprinkled with powerful psychological triggers. In your content, clearly state the problems that you are addressing and the solutions and benefits that you are providing. Of course, the solutions and benefits can only be achieved thru the purchase of the product, service or membership you are selling.

5. Always place a primary call-to-action in your landing page. Grab the customers’ attention by having text that is easy-to-read and relevant to the call-to-action. It is also a good idea to repeat the call-to-action both above and below the fold. “Above the fold” is the screen area when the visitors first see your landing page. “Below the fold” is the area when they eventually scroll down.

6. Design your landing page so that you control the path customers take to conversion. Provide limited links to other web pages within the site. The less options visitors have on your landing page, the more likely they will be led to commit to a buying decision.

7. Use easy-to-read web pages by placing black text over white or very light-colored backgrounds. Use short paragraphs and a generous amount of whitespaces to make it easy to the readers’ eyes. Don’t give your visitors the excuse to bail out of your web page because of “eye fatigue”.

8. If you can’t avoid having long copies, subdivide the contents with sub-headings to improve readability. Use bullet points and highlight some copies when necessary.

9. Include relevant pictures or animation. The presence of photos, that clearly promote your product or service, sets the theme of the landing page and grabs the visitors’ attention. By making these photos clickable and placing it near your call-to-action, it is guaranteed to have a strong impact on your conversion rates.

10. Finally, guarantee your product. Give your customers the option to return your product, with or without reason, within a period of days after the purchase.

Optimizing your landing pages and placing a little more effort and time in nurturing the visitors’ experience once they land on your landing pages would be time and money well spent. Implementing the above pointers for each of your landings pages will allow your business to have higher customer retention and loyalty, better conversion rates and unbelievable profits for your business. Keep your landing pages simple but effective and always look at your landing pages from your visitors’ eyes to get better returns.

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Of all the things that you’ll need in order to make your business a success, building excellent customer relationships is one of the most important. Common sense would tell you that the success you have with customers will increase the profitability of your business. The key success objective is not to be preoccupied with one-time sales, as most businesses would like to believe, but to have sustained and growing sales. The only way to achieve this is to nurture customers relationships, evolving first time buyers to loyal, long-term customers. This article discusses the importance and the three ways to building customer relationships to set your business apart from the rest and help your business to thrive.

Make your business customer-centric
With the ever increasing competitiveness in any market, product differentiation, in terms of prices, quality or packaging, is no longer the major factor for a business to stand out. More businesses are attaining success thru customer-centric initiatives by meeting the customers needs and converting these needs into opportunities. Being customer-centric may include activities like faster response to inquiries; easier access thru phone, email or 24×7 web access; efficient delivery and excellent after sales service and support.

Establish reliable partners
Include your partners in your customer relationship lifecycle. For example, if you outsource delivery of products, make sure the company doing this is aiming for the same goals as your business goals. If delivery gets delayed, your customers will be chasing your company and not your partners. In any business, the last mile of providing excellent customer relationships is as important as the first mile.

Implement CRM system
By having a customer relationship management in place, your business gains insights into their customers’ needs, harnesses opportunities to respond to those needs and increases customer retention. The smooth integration of processes provided by CRM can turn challenges into opportunities and can increase profitability. With CRM, every member of the company from marketing, sales and customer service will have the appropriate visibility into customers’ information, all designed to align company activities for building stronger customer relationships.

All the above are creative ways to have excellent customer relationships. Knowing its importance, you will definitely want to implement a CRM system on your organization. The easiest and quickest method to do this is to a have a web-based CRM solution seamlessly integrated with your business processes like lead generation, sales activities, marketing campaigns, newsletters circulations and direct mailings. Maintaining strong customer relationships will help you gain more business and your company will be much more appealing to customers once a CRM is in place.

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Haven’t you ever noticed that every day you subscribe to a service, you get a username and password. The problem is.. it’s getting too confusing to control all of them. How do you do it? with a text file on your computer? A printed document with all your username and passwords by your desk?

I would like to recommend a great service called Roboform. It has all the recommendations:

Try it out here. They have a 100% guarantee. So far, everyone I’ve told loves Roboform.

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How to run email marketing campaigns and be successful with them? It seems rather easy to set up and configure an email marketing campaign, but running it successfully is quite different. There are many things that you must consider first. In fact, many of the things that you’ll read about here are not discussed often. Before you even take that first step to run your first email marketing campaign, consider this…

Be Direct To The Point

To be successful in email marketing campaign, avoid creating long-copy emails. This may work on web page copy but email marketing is different. Spam or not, people are already confronted with a lot of emails and they are not that too willing to go thru reading a very long email. People want instant gratification. Write in a direct-to-the-point manner with the intention of immediately satisfying your readers’ curiosity.

Provide Good Content By Giving Helpful Information

One of the tenets of effective email promotion is to give valuable information to your readers. When you set out to educate your readers, you build trust and loyalty. If what you only do is sell on your email marketing campaigns, you will soon wear them out and they will opt-out of your list eventually. Focus on relevant content and don’t be too pushy with sales.

Allow readers to opt-out

Be sure they have opted-in in the first place. Then comply with the law by allowing your readers to opt-out at anytime. Aside from the legal requirement, it is just good business practice to allow people to be deleted from your circulation. No matter how hard you try, hard selling thru your email marketing campaigns won’t just work.

Your email marketing campaign should be measurable

Track your results and gauge the effectiveness of your efforts. Without any form of statistics to track, it is like doing Google PPC campaign without the analytics. With measurable results, you will be able to determine which email marketing campaigns are being profitable and which are just a waste of time and money.  Remove the unprofitable campaigns and focus your efforts on campaigns with good ROI.

Whether you are just starting your new business or have been a company owner for years, knowing how to run email marketing campaigns, that are successful, will definitely help your bottom line. If you play your cards right, potential clients will trust in you and this will help your business grow.

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With the growing number of Content Management Systems or blog platforms available today, it seems rather easy to set up or configure a website without any knowledge of HTML or programming. However,the ease of having an online presence does not always translate to having a good website design. A bad website design is not that difficult to spot. Most people are unconsciously aware of these bad website design characteristics. If you want a website that is pleasing to the visitors’ eyes, it is always advisable that you become aware of the common traits of bad website design so you can avoid these design mistakes when you have your own website. Here are a few pointers to help you get started.

Background And Text

Dark background, incompatible color combination of background and text, or very small font size makes for very hard reading. Stay away from stylish fonts but instead use sans-serif fonts for your contents. Having the right color combination and good font size will increase usability of your site and make a big impact on the visitors’ experience.

Communication Style

It is nice to appear smart and intelligent but geek speak or highly intellectual discussions will not be received well by your visitors. Each of your webpage should not be used for showing off your linguistic prowess or technically-laden lingo. The rule here is to clearly communicate with your audience in an easy to understand, grammatically-correct, direct to the point format. Technical information should be presented in the language level of your visitors.

Graphics

Having nice large graphics is only good for printed articles or advertisement. Online, it is better to use light graphics so webpages are loaded fast. If your website can’t serve up content quickly and the longer you make your visitors wait, the faster your visitors will leave your site never to return.

Templates and Navigation

Use templates so you will have consistent look and feel within your website. If your visitors have to reorient and re-learn the headers, navigation and footers for every webpage, your visitors will eventually get tired and leave.

Pop-ups

Unless extremely needed, don’t use pop-ups. It is by far the single most annoying thing your visitor encounters while browsing. When visitors close the pop-ups, they also close your site, never to be annoyed again.

As regularly producing websites for my clients, I see a lot of website designers both good and bad. More often, the bad website designers have mastered the art and science of bad and ugly website design. I’m pretty confident this article opens your eyes and will help you identify the difference between the two.

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