Many wonder how it is possible to make money with Twitter. The service is free to use, but you don’t get paid for using it. As previously stated, you can make money if you sell a product or a service. This is because you develop a following on Twitter. These individuals are called followers, but they are also your friends or your contacts. Messages are sent throughout the system.

When using Twitter to market or sell a product or service, proceed with caution. You do not want to outright sell, as you may be labeled as a spammer. Instead, do so subtly. For example, do you run a website that sells eBooks? If so, your message could say “It took weeks, but my website is finally complete. I sell eBooks. Checkout the website and tell me if you like the format.” This gets people to your website, but without you technically soliciting a sale.

You can also use @replies to market a website selling eBooks, or any other product or service. Say you receive a message that says “I wish there was an easier way to learn about making money online. There are so many websites to visit.” You can respond with “Hey, I have a website that has an eBook for sale on working from home. It has all the information you need in one place.” Since you are responding to a message, your aren’t outright spamming Twitter members.

As you can see, there are multiple ways for you to use Twitter as an internet marketing tool and to improve your profits. The only problem is you must first develop a list of followers. Yes, your close friends and family are a good start, but they may already know all about your business and what you sell. That is why you need to expand your horizons, but how do you do so?

First, it is important to determine your targeted market. If you sell eBooks on a wide range of subjects, you will have a wide market. If you sell used kids clothes on eBay, your target market will include parents, and so forth. Once you know who your targeted market it, it is easier to find these individuals on Twitter.

As for how you can do so, the easiest approach is to join online communities. In keeping with selling kids clothes online. Join message boards for parents. Start conversations with other members. After a few days, make a post stating that you are a member of Twitter and are looking for other contacts. Say you want people to follow you on Twitter, but that you will follow them too. Not only do you get followers, but you get those in your targeted market.

Next, you can turn to the Twitter website itself. From the main page, you can click the “Find People,” link. Search for members with profiles online. You can search by location or name. Quickly scan a profile to see if a bio is present. If so, read it. What is the person interested in? Are they are parent, pet owner, or do you see other signs that classify them as a member of your target market? If so, make contact. This approach is time consuming, but it does work.

Finally, it is important to know how updates are sent. Although private updates are allowed, many Twitter members send updates to everyone on their contact list. If a reply is sent and not privately, you can see it. This allows you to see the name of other Twitter members. Become a follower. If the person you are now adding is a friend or family member of someone in your targeted market, they may share similar interests.

1. Users Searching for a Specific Service

One way to gain new clients through the use of Twitter is when someone searches for a specific service they need. If someone comes to Twitter and does a search for a ghostwriter the chances of their search term containing those words is very high, right? So, why not create a page just for your writing services? You can make the username something with the term “ghostwriter” or “writing” in it.

2. Overflow from other Service Providers

The second way you can gain clients via Twitter is to network with other service providers in your niche. By following and interacting with these individuals you are allowing them to contact you should they need assistance with a big project or any overflow work that they don’t have the time to handle themselves.

3. Service Providers Who Need Your Expertise

There are tons of business owners out there who are looking for your expertise to help them get their own business running smoothly. It’s not uncommon to see an Internet marketer on Twitter who has spent all afternoon working on their website and asking for advice or direction on what they need to do to fix this or that. They would probably have been more than willing to hire you to do it for them instead of spending all day doing it themselves.

4. Other Twitter Users Stumbling Upon Your Profile

When people start using Twitter they are looking for like-minded individuals to follow and connect with. When they come across your profile for whatever reason and see that you provide a certain service, it might just remind them that they need help with something. Make sure you have your link readily available to them when they see your page.

5. Word of Mouth

By far the most common way to gain new clients via Twitter is through word of mouth. If your past or current clients are members of the Twitter community, chances are at some point or another they will talk about you and/or your business. Now there is a kick here. As with any other type of service, if yours is bad it’s probably got a good chance of being brought up on Twitter. However, the same rings true for exceptionally great service. Provide your current clients with wonderful service and they will pass the word on about your business every chance they get.

Forum Posts ~ add your link with keyword anchor text in your sig file

Blog Comments ~ keyword in the “name” area, and then your url. (will create a hot link with anchor text)

Comments at Ezine Articles ~ this one just occurred to me recently. I checked the source code and they do not appear to use the “no follow” attribute, so google should count these links. You may even get traffic from these too. I just enter my main keyword, and add a relevant comment to the article. I use this like I would a blog comment with my keyword in the name area and then my url. You have to wait for EZA to approve your comment, but it’s worth it.

Set up Google Alert for keywords ~ each time I set up a new site I also set up a google alert for the keyword. I only choose to get alerts from blogs. Now each time someone posts a blog on my keyword I know about it and can get over there and add a comment.

Build free Blogs ~ Build a blog at wordpress.com, blogger, tumblr or wherever. You can do this blog on a related topic and add your site in the blogroll. This will give you a link for each page you publish on this blog. I use PLR for these blogs, and just change up the articles a little bit so they are more original. You can also add links within the articles to your blog for added links.

I didn’t build these blogs expecting to get traffic from them, but I quickly started receiving traffic via the wordpress search function. So make sure your content is at least decent and you may find yourself getting more traffic as well as backlinks.

Hubpages and Squidoo ~ build pages at both of these free sites. Make sure to add a link to your site using keywords as your anchor text. At squidoo you can also add a link to your product or service you are promoting. Depending on how you want to use Hubpages I would be careful adding links to affiliate products over there. I just use hubpages as a way to get one more link from a quality source to my new niche site.

Zimbio ~ this site is new to me. I have used it for my squidoo lenses, by adding my lensmaster RSS feed url from Squid Utils it will post each new lens I write on Zimbio. You can do this with the RSS feeds for each of your sites, including your main niche site, as well as any free blogs you set up. Make sure to do this first so it will catch all your articles as you put them up.

Directory Submission~ there are tons of directories you can add your site url to. Here’s a great list of directories you can get started with. (this site also has a huge list of social bookmarking sites and article directories) I set the timer for 30 minutes and just go as fast as I can submitting. I do this at least once a day for 30 minutes.

Wis.dm ~ A fun little site where you can ask a question. There is space for you to submit a url where people can find the answer. Just think of a question that relates to your niche and then add your site url in the space provided.

Twitter ~ not sure how good this is for backlinks, but if you have some people following you, it might be worth sending a quick tweet about your new site. You might just mention you found a cool site etc, so as not to give away all your niches. You can now add retweet buttons to your lenses (like the one right here in this module) The button makes it super easy for anyone who likes your lens to help you get the word out on twitter. If you like this lens ~ please give it a retweet, all you have to do is click the button in the corner!!

If you want to take things to the next level there are also services and membership sites you can join to build links. I have not joined any of the link building membership sites as of yet. If I decide to do it, I’ll let you know how it goes. If you are currently using a link building site, leave a comment and let me know about it.

I keep remembering this comment from Court’s Internet Marketing School Blog. He talked about how you should be spending 90% of your time building links. When I thought about how much time I was spending in this area it was probably about .5%. Stay focused, and set up a system for yourself and you too can build tons of great backlinks.

Back links are the driving force behind the world of search engine optimization and page ranking. To do well in the results of specific search in the search engines the site must have higher page rank and higher page rank is achievable through getting some great back links.

Basically back links are the links which are in other sites that links to your site. Back links are really easy to create but it’s a boring and monotonous job. There is no good amount of back links that will get you a great page rank or a good rating in the search engines.

How to create back links:

There are many ways of creating back links and these methods change as the field of search engine optimization is growing day by day.

1. Anchor text : To create back links firstly you have to learn how to create anchor text. An example is here :

2. Article writing: Article writing is the best way to get the best back links. There are plenty of article sites to give you a great back link. You have to just write a great article along with your sites anchor text and link. You can use automated software to do this but make sure your article is a great one and it is on your sites keywords.
3. Forum posting : There are many forums and blogs now on the internet to have your precious site’s link. To create you have to add your link like an anchor text. The higher the forum’s page rank the higher your page links are granted.

4. Blog Comments : To create back links in blogs you have to have the keywords in the name area and then your address. Then a link will be created in the name area of yours.

5. Twitter : If there are many following you then twitter is a great way to have back links too. Its one of the new ways to have back links now a days.

6. Wis.dm : This is a new site where you can ask many questions and answer them. Just pick one with your related topic and then give your site’s link.

7. Hub pages and Squidoo : These sites let you build pages in the net along with great back links to support you site. But there is a difference in squido and hub pages. You have to be careful in Hub pages for back links as it lets you add more links than the squido for your site.

8. Google alert for keywords : This is one of the primary way to get updated about your keywords on the internet. Each time for setting up a new site you have to set Google alert for your keywords. For this you get news whenever anyone sets up a new blog on that keyword and you can add your link in that new blog.

9. Directory submission : This method also contain social book marking and many web directory submission. This is a tedious way of doing back links as there are tons of directories and you just can count on any sources. Just take an half hour each day to submit in different directories. But now a days there are many software available that submits automatically to the directories.

10. Social Book marking Site : Its one of the best ways of creating great back links but only if you have much friends and their time. This is a method where you and you friends post and comment on your own keywords leaving you with great back links. But you really want good friends and a great popularity to get this done.

11. Video marketing : Now a days it is very popular among the upcoming web programmers to launch their sites video in different video sites like you tube or other videos site. This gains much traffic to your site rather than back links but it’s an innovative way too.

12. Link exchange : This is one of the ways for the bigger fish with money and less time. There are plenty of sites that sale your link on their ranked site. The higher the PR(page rank) the higher the price. But sometimes if you are out for a look and good communicative skill then you can even buy yourself a free back link in any related site of your preferred keyword. Of course the owner must be as eager as you to let you use his site for free! But be careful about the link farming sites. Those are strictly not supported by the search engine crawlers.

The Mistakes :

The common mistakes on creating back links is giving your site’s link in those sites where you site would not be followed as it is coded in the robot text. Then you site would not be found in the results of your wished keywords.

Another thing is that posting your links in irrelevant sites. This a common mistakes among the amateurs. If you do this then the search crawlers will be taking this as a spamming and cut you off their search.

So this should be taken seriously as if you get cut off by the search engine’s crawler then it would be a disaster in your way of getting a good page rank.

Perfect way :

Perhaps you have already found out that there is no ultimate way of having great back links. But to get in the wrong direction, a thousand doors are open. So be careful with creating back links. Stay updated and most of all spend time. That’s what is important to learn here. The methods may change, the outputs may differ but there are no other ways rather than being steady and industrious over the matter.

So I have tried to go through all the matters found in the great cookbook of creating back links but the world of back linking is changing. So with great keywords, contents and most important great back links can get you a higher search engine optimization.

1) Symbol Logo- As the word suggests, symbol logo is devoid of letters and words, it contains only images, shapes and symbols. You must be thinking for what type of companies or situations would profit more from symbol logos. If your organization is already well-established venture and is known to the masses, then having stylish and clear symbolic logo helps. When you had used combination logo for quite sometime and want to exceed your brand recognition in the market, the option of symbol logo is a better choice. Having a unique symbol for your company will not make you lost in the rat race of capturing the targeted market. If you have time and energy to make the symbol logo trademark for your company, make it legalize by completing legal formalities.

Selection of symbol has to be made very carefully as it might have diverse meanings in different cultures, especially when your business is spread globally. Many unspoken messages can be communicated through symbols. But if your company is new on the block and it’s just the starting point with a fixed budget then avoid going in for symbol logo.

2) Text Logo – Text logo contains mainly your company’s name, here graphical elements can also be inserted. Borders, lines, boxes, letters, etc can be used in logo designing for better interaction. The use of graphic element should not dominate this type of logos. For situations like the business name being too big and contains many words altogether that cannot be abbreviated, should go for text logo. In case your business has a unique name, using it in text logo gives unforgettable one.

Many times a company offers wide range of products/services that cannot be alone symbolized through a solo image or picture. Here text logo accomplishes the goal of such companies. Text logos should have trademark protection which would make it unique and outstanding.

3) Combination Logo- This type of logo contains both graphic image and business name. It works best for business that are small or medium sized, or a company that has started their business recently. Combination logo helps in creating strong brand recognition and is visually very strong.

The symbol can speak to the services that the company offers, while the company name increases the company recognition.

Those where three main types of logos, their selection is largely based on your business and exact professional requirements. However take suggestions and do research before doting on the final logo design. Logos are essential part of any company and its identity. It also makes easy to beat the competition and build up customer trust and faith in your brand.

The same strategies in optimizing a website apply to promoting it through social media networks. Keywords are still the secret to making it work. A professional seo company says you need to create quality content that is relevant, useful, and optimized with keywords.

If you are interested in promoting your website through social media networking, below are some of the most popular social media sites you could start with. These sites are often used not just by seo companies in promoting their sites but by ordinary internet users as well.

1.Digg – A website that lets users discover and share content by submitting links and stories, and then voting and commenting on these submitted links and stories. Good quality content is often described by SEO enthusiasts as ‘diggable’.

2.Technorati – An internet search engine for blogs.

3.del.icio.us – A social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.

4.Yahoo! Answer – A community-driven knowledge market website by Yahoo! that allows users to submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users.

5.Flickr – An image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform.

6.Reddit – A social news website on which users can post links to content on the web.

7.Wikipedia – A free, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by Wikimedia Foundation.

8.YouTube – A video sharing website where users can upload, view, and share video clips.

9.StumbleUpon – An internet community that allows its users to discover and rate web pages, photos and videos.

10.Newsvine – A community-powered news website which draws content from its users and syndicated content from mainstream sources.

E-commerce Web sites are a sort of reciprocal information exchange. E-commerce websites are designed with the sole purpose of simplifying the online shopping experience of a web visitor or to guide the visitor to make a purchase online. The web site design involves many complexities, but a designer working in electronic commerce web design needs to understand the principles of selling online.

For a viewer the e-commerce web design and web design may look similar normal because both follow the same principles of website design is attractive, the systematic organization of the elements, correct color palette to boost spirit website. The differences begin to troops in once you have a close look at some of the e-commerce web design and web design eCommerce Web designs. Every must follow some simple principles, such as the sale of:

1. Simplifying online shopping experience: Users prefer online shopping to avoid the hassles of offline purchases. Therefore, it becomes the priority of web designer to ensure that the design of the website offers the best online shopping experience for the user.

2. Providing authenticated information: The user must have the reason to believe your site and how easily it can get to you.

Customers are more attracted to the array of things for virtual shopping. It becomes very difficult for the designer of websites to which the virtual purchase agreement through the web design. It is far easier for the web designer to display the objects without the hassle of space limitations. It is relatively difficult for the web designer to attract customers to shop through the web design.

Customers prefer to design e-commerce website, which will take you to the right with the minimum number of clicks. Web designers often use some unconventional techniques to promote e-commerce web designs. Sometimes, a web designer can utilize the full potential of the Web page is only through the integration of the order form at the end. Many people perceive sales letter as a good example of e-commerce web design. In fact, sales of the letter are not a good example of web design and e-commerce that are specific niches and may sell a single product. However, the sales letters are capable of high conversions because they present the product information in an intelligent way.

Supermarkets and shopping centers are similar to both online stores showcase products. As in the commercial centers of the arrangement of things, it seems much simpler to shop online. It is difficult for the user to navigate through the complex web page to look for things. The e-commerce web sites make it easier for the visitor of the website to browse the product section easily with the help of personalization technology. This technology also casts spell on customizing the design of e-commerce websites.

Patterns play an important role in the success of e-commerce web design. Most website designs e-commerce is distinguished by their designs. These e-commerce websites are always looking for a simplified design to attract customers to buy things. The average time for each customer spends on a website is about 2 minutes before leaving the site. So these two minutes should be utilized to maximum in order to attract customers. Much research has been conducted to find the most accessible website design. Found that most of the first customers to see the central left and central part of the website. By balancing these regions with the content in an elegant design of these web pages web designers know how to create an easy way for visitors to browse the online store and make the purchase easy.

Below are few points which will help you to set up your own website.

1) A Blog: Set up a blog website with no cost

There are many websites available online which will allow you to setup a blog for free using their own embedded software. In a matter of minutes, you can set up a website using one of these platforms. Do some homework and find out which website offers this type of service for free or with minimal charges.

2) A website with minimal content: A website with couple of paragraphs and content only

If your interest is to set up just a happy looking small website to begin with, there are many websites where you can type in content according to you and add graphics and so forth that are included within the website. You do not require any expertise in respect to HTML and the best thing is you can set up a website in very short period of time very easily. In your small website, there would be a problem wherein you’ll have more restrictions as to the format that you will be allowed to use and the content which you can include.

3) Domain: Buy a domain name for your website

Once you select a format or platform that you want to use and are ready with basic requirements for your blog website, you need to register a domain name at a place that offers domains for a very low price. Now you have total control over the content of your website and you can start building back-links to it. Knowing that any effort that you put into it will be benefiting you instead of someone else website.

So what is POSH? No, it’s not just some new clothing fashion hype amongst web designers – POSH is the acronym for Plain Old Semantic HTML. The term Semantic HTML is used for a variety of things, but it has it’s origin in one objective: creating (X)HTML documents using semantic elements and attributes, as opposed to using presentational HTML. The term POSH was coined because a group of highly respected web designers wanted to have a short mnemonic to easily capture the essence of the concept of Semantic HTML.

In this article, I talk about why you should use POSH, exactly what you need to do to implement it (many of you are probably doing this already, and a few of you might not even realize it!) and how you can optimize it to improve SEO for your site. I also take a brief look at Microformats at the end of the article.

Why Should I Use Semantic HTML?

You could just say: “because it’s the right thing for the web,” but it’s benefits go far beyond that. For instance, it makes it easier for screenreaders to interpret in an order that will make sense to users with visual impairments.

Secondly, SEO and Semantic HTML are close friends. They might sometimes have conflicts of interest, which we’ll get to later on in this document, but over all, they’re friends. The purpose of SEO is to help search engine spiders better understand what a page is about and therefore categorize them better. Since a search engine spider basically has even less capabilities than a screenreader, it needs even more guidance in determining a page’s structure and topic. Good semantic HTML provides just that structure.

Semantic HTML tries to convey meaning through the words and the tags on a page. Try thinking of it this way: the content on the page is the words you speak. The tags provide the structure, the intonation, the pauses and even the looks on your face. Basically, your tags are half your message.

Site structure

In my previous article on dev.opera.com I talked about site structures, with the aim of providing a clear way for search engines to discover which page on your site discusses which topic – this can be further improved by using Semantic HTML.

Page Structure

A page consists of a title, one or more headings, and content. This content can contain paragraphs of text, lists, quotes, images and tables. All these types of information have their own designated tag(s). We will treat all those tags, starting with the headings. Use this page about sortable tables as an example to follow along with for the coming points.

Headings, from h1 to h6

A good document has headings and subheadings, because headings make it easier to determine the topic of a page. These headings can range in importance from h1 to h6. To be honest, I never use h5 and h6 myself. I usually have only one h1 tag on a content page; on portal pages, blog homepages for instance; you can have multiple h1’s, for all your articles for example. From a semantic perspective that might be weird, from an SEO perspective, it’s great.

Strict semanticists sometimes suggest that you should only have one h1, two h2’s, 3 h3’s etc. I don’t agree with that, as I think it’s very normal for a document to have more than two h2’s, in fact, this document has a lot more of them, and I think it’s very well structured.

Very often, designers who have heard a bit about Semantic HTML will fit the name of a site in the header into an h1 tag. On the homepage of a site, that might be a very wise decision. On every other page within your site, you probably have a specific topic, which might be related to your site’s name but doesn’t have to be. On those sub pages, that topic should be in the h1 tag, and it’s wise to put the name of your site into an h4 tag or maybe even a span.

Search engines give the words used in the various headings more weight in determining the topic of a page. The keyword your page is optimized for should appear at least once in an h1 tag, and related keywords should be used in the other headings, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Images

Images are used in all sorts of ways within documents, and you should apply the proper semantics to them. The only really useful semantic variable on an img tag is the alt attribute, and it should only be used if the image adds meaning to the document. If the image is there only for decorative purposes, leave the altattribute empty. Otherwise, describe what the image is showing in the alt attribute.

If you’re using images to replace text, because you want the text to look nicer (image replacement,) make sure that you’re using normal text in your HTML, and that you replace that text with images by using CSS. You have to do this because both people with visual impairments and search engines cannot read the text in your images. My own preferred method of doing this is through applying the image with CSS background-image, and then hiding the HTML text using a large text-indent (about -1000px or so does the trick.) Be careful though: the text in the image should be exactly the same as the text in your document. If it’s not, you risk losing a lot of ranking value from the search engines.

Abbreviations and acronyms

You’re bound to do it as a web designer – I do it in this article several times – using acronyms or abbreviations. When you do, make sure you provide the written out version of the term using abbr or acronym tags. That’s good for your keyword density too!

Tables

We all know why using tables for layout out web sites is bad, and we also know what they are supposed to be used for – displaying tabular data. Just using basic tables is a big step in the right direction, but there are a number of ways in which you can improve your tables’ semantic value, thereby improving your site’s SEO further:
Use table headings (th) for your table’s headings (it’s really that easy)
If you can, use the thead, tbody and tfoot sections to properly section your table
Provide a caption for your table, describing what’s in it

The caption and the table headings would be a good, and usually natural place to use some of your document’s keywords.

Emphasizing your meaning

Remember I said earlier that tags should be the emotion of your text? This is where the real emotion comes in: you can provide emphasis to certain words using em or strong. In the old days, people used b and i for that, but these tags are no longer encouraged, since they imply a specific styling, whereas HTML should only describe structure/meaning (all style should be created using CSS, of course.)

Search engines give more weight to any words marked up using any of these four tags. Overusing them can do more harm than good, and actually cause a loss of emphasis, but if treated with care, they can apply an extra dimension to your documents.

A few words on (i)frames

It’s quite simple: don’t use them. Search engines don’t get them, and screenreaders have quite a hard time using them as well.

Conflicts of interest

All of the above rules can be bent a little of course, which is a good thing, as sometimes it’s necessary to keep everyone at your organization happy. Say your boss wants a page to have a zappy marketing title you’d rather not have, because it doesn’t exactly describe what’s on the page, and pushes your most important keyword to the second heading. If you’re in a competitive area, it might be wise to make the page look like that for your boss, yet use an h2 for the first heading, and an h1 for the second.

The same goes for iframes and images. If someone really wants you to put a certain block of content on a specific well-ranking page, but you don’t want to risk losing focus, you could of course put that content into an iframe or image, and choose not to provide an alternative.

These decisions are up to you in the end – normal semantics should be the basis of your design, and the conflicts should only arise when you’re really optimizing your pages.

Not so simple semantic HTML – Microformats

Microformats are also semantic HTML, but they are not exactly simple! At the moment, search engines are hardly using microformats in their algorithms, but that might change. The hCard especially (the HTML version of the vCard) has some very easy and obvious uses for search engines, and I suspect that they will start using those within the next couple of years. You can apply intelligent extra semantics within Microformats using the basic set of HTML elements – for example, a good way of marking up your address hCard is by using the address tag as a container!

Conclusion

By using semantic HTML to mark up your pages, you can create pages that are more accessible, both to people with disabilities, as well as to search engines. Good semantic markup helps search engines to determine what the topic of a page is, and if used together with a good site structure, allows you pushy up your web site rankings!

You can find some of the most popular applications for WordPress like HootSuite, ScribeFire, WordPress for iPhone and etc…