Archive for March, 2010

HTML Tips to Help Your Business – Part 1

Author: Steve Males

Mar 26

In the past I did a City & Guilds in HTML web design, learnt how to make a websites with notepad and code them from scratch.

These days with all the tools available online and the fact design flair isn’t my strong point I use the tools availale to do the web design for me.

I do still find it valuable to have the knowledge on how to do it from scratch though.  That’s why I have put this post together.  Some simple beginner HTML that you might find useful in your blog, website or even autoresponder messages.

Some Basics

HTML is made up of tags.  All tags (with a few exceptions) require an end tag.  A web page will always start with <html> and end with </html>.  A forward slash / is placed infront of the tag to show it is the end tag.

How to change the name of a link.

Setting a Hyperlink as they are called is done like this.

<a href=”http://www.steve-males.com”>Link to Steve Males’ Website.</a>

<a href> tag is ended with an end tag of </a>

The target is actually written into the tag itself and whatever you type between <a href=”??????”> and the end tag of </a> is what gets displayed.

So

<a href=”http://www.steve-males.com”>Link to Steve Males’ Website.</a>

will show as

Link to Steve Males’ Website

and be a link to the target of http://www.steve-males.com

This is useful if you are sending your subscribers to a Clickbank product for example as you can mask your affiliate link.

When I send an email out to my list promoting George Browns Traffic Ultimatum which has the very unattractive link of http://b5dcdoy1-b19q94g9c4hz4vgwx.hop.clickbank.net/ i do it like this: -

<a href=”http://b5dcdoy1-b19q94g9c4hz4vgwx.hop.clickbank.net/”>George Browns Traffic Ultimatum</a>

So when the subscriber opens my mail it displays like this: -

George Browns Traffic Ultimatum

With me so far?  Good, next we’ll look a…

Pictures

Every picture on the web has a location so in addition to uploading the picture to your own site you can reference a pictures location on another.  Useful in emails so you don’t have to attach the image but can show it in the mail as if it is.

This is one of the exceptions to the rule that this tag doesn’t have an end tag.

It is quite simply <img src=”???”> where img means image and src is source.

I’ve just been to one of my other websites, right clicked on a picture of me and clicked properties.  This then displays the location of that image and I copied it and pasted it in to my <img> tag.

So this <img src=”http://www.steve-males.com/uploads/2/9/0/1/2901732/7067702.jpg”> will display on the website or on an email as: -

Now what if you want the picture to be the link to another site?  Well put both the above lessons together and you can make this picture become a link to a site like this: -

<a href=”http://www.steve-males.com”><img src=”http://www.steve-males.com/uploads/2/9/0/1/2901732/7067702.jpg”></a>

Here you can see I’ve replace the text Link to Steve Males’ Website with the <img> tag.  It would like this and also if you click it links to that site: -

I don’t want to make this the longest blog post in the world so I’ll let you digest that now and come back with part 2 and maybe more in a short time.

Good luck and if you found it helpful give it a retweet :)
Steve.

  • 0 Comments
  • Filed under: Blog

    • Internet Marketing – The Importance of Having a Plan

    Author: Steve Males

    Mar 22

    If you are new to Internet Marketing then no doubt you have found yourself going off at a tangent or getting distracted. This is bound to happen, Internet Marketing is such a vast area and even within a specific area there are different niches and different ways of doing things.

    Personal discipline will help and creating a plan will keep you focussed on what it is that you are aiming for.

    Decide what you want to achieve on that day and stick to it, write a “To Do” list and put the amount of time you plan to spend on that task and don’t go over it.to do list

    In the early days and now I get a lot of leads for my business from Twitter. Twitter is great there are tools available to help to you manage your followers and even schedule your tweets for when you are not about. As I learnt though you can quite easily spend a lot of time on Twitter, Facebook is the same, you think “I’ll just check my social network sites” and 3 hours later you are wondering where the time went and what you actually achieved in those 3 hours. Remember spending so much time on these sites might get you some leads but unless you come away from them and follow up on these leads you are not going to make any sales!

    It is inevitable that you will come across information and tools of interest as you start out and many will open up a whole new avenue you didn’t know about before. You may be researching Private Label Resale Rights products and come across Affiliate Marketing. This is good as it is all a great learning curve but bouncing around from pillar to post in your research is going to eat hours, confuse you and stop you completing any actions on that all important To Do list. It is very easy to spend a whole day reading on the internet but there is a good chance you’ll be confused.

    Have that to do list next to you. If you read about something you want to look into further write it down on another list. Refer back to this later but for now carry out the actions you have set yourself. In a lot of cases it will be an email or Facebook message that sends you off on a tangent from your plan. A great way to tackle this is to write your to do list first thing in the morning. Reverse the order of what you plan to do. Step one in many cases will be check email. Later you might be planning to record a video message for your blog. Do the video first. Before you open your emails, check your Facebook or Twitter do those one or two tasks that will mean you have accomplished something. It takes time for that video to be uploaded to the internet anyway, an ideal opportunity to check your emails then.

    If you spend the afternoon going off at tangents or get carried away with Twitter and Facebook then at least you have some tasks complete that day.

    You can allocate hours in the day to going back to the list you have started of things to look into further, in this time concentrate on that topic only. If you come across something else jot it down on the list and carry on with what it is you are researching today.

    If you are marketing online already you will have no doubt found yourself in this position at some point.

    If you haven’t started yet and you are reading this as part of your research into internet marketing I have some further advice for you. One of my favourite quotes is “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going…” this is so true! Internet marketing is a vast area that spans many niches, if you are going to spend any sort of money to invest in a business you would be crazy not to do your due diligence first but on the flip side if you plan to read up on internet marketing in it’s entirety before actually starting then I imagine you will be still reading as they cart you to the old folks home. When you’ve found an area of internet marketing that takes your interest give it a go, it could be affiliate marketing or resale rights products, whatever, get cracking and learn on the way. In a short space of time you could be writing your own product on “How to Get Started as an Internet Marketer – Volume 1″

    Whichever it is I wish you luck.

  • 2 Comments
  • Filed under: Blog

    • My Top 7 Free Methods to Get Traffic to Your Site

    Author: Steve Males

    Mar 3

    No matter what you sell online you can be sure that you will need traffic! With the search engines changing the rules all the time and Pay Per Click being costly unless you know what you are doing people want FREE methods of getting traffic to their websites and capture pages. Here are my top 7 ways of getting some quality traffic for FREE.

    1. Social Networks.

    They are free to join and easy to find people in the niche you are promoting in, I prefer twitter for this as there are many websites to help automate the experience. There are websites for automatically following people that tweet about the keywords you would be looking for, my personal preference is TweetSpinner.com You don’t have to be sat at Twitter all day long posting out your links as there are also websites that allow you schedule tweets, spending half an hour in the morning is all it needs to set up some schedule tweets throughout the day, check out Socialoomph.com If you’re followers are targeted based on keywords then the more followers you have the more potential people will see your tweets. Just don’t spam, people want helpful information and quotes etc as well as a link to your site every now and again.

    2. Forums.

    Forums are a great untapped resource for traffic. Check the rules on the site prior to posting but usually you are allowed a bio box with a link or two. These get automatically placed at the bottom of each and every post you write. Don’t put your links blatantly in the posts (this is usually against the forum rules anyway and will get you kicked off the forum) Just post helpful information and respond to other peoples questions. If you help someone they are likely to check out your links and bio box. You will get the instant response from the person you helped plus remember forum content stays around for years so there is a lot of people that could see your posts. There is usually a forum in every imaginable niche so whatever you promote have a look.

    3. Blogging.

    Blogging is great as the search engines love blog posts so they rank highly. You may have noticed when ever you search for anything online there is usually someones blog post that appears high up in the rankings. If you use blog software such as WordPress these usually “ping” the search engines when you create a new blog post. Pinging is letting the search engines know you have updated your blog. If you don’t use WordPress or are unsure if your blog “pings” the search engines then try a website called pingomatic.com it will ping several search engines for you.

    4. Video Marketing.

    YouTube is very big now and many people are using this to promote their business. When you upload a video you can assign it key words, you can place these videos on your sites too. Viral is best though! How many times have you received a funny video on you tube and forwarded it on to 20 people, no doubt 20 of their friends forwarded it on to 20 of their friends too so you can see how quickly it can spread. If the video has a link to your site on it then that could create you a lot of traffic.

    5. Article Marketing.

    OK I admit I’m writing this article not only to help you out but also because I know if you do find it useful there is a good chance you’ll click my links at the end and find out more about me and what I do. Again articles are liked by the search engines so write an article about what you promote and that’s another way to get traffic. Again articles are around for a long time so can be seen by many.

    6. Responses (Blog and Article)

    If you read a blog post or article you like and it relates to what you market in leave a comment on it. Most blog and article responses will ask for your website. It’s just another place for your link to be seen and the more links available to be seen means more traffic.

    7. Free Classifieds

    Yes these do exist, funded by the paid adverts on the websites these are a great way to get targeted traffic, there are many so search in Google but my recommendation would be Phinditt.com Choose the area you wish the advert to be seen, select a category and section for your advert then come up with a great headline that will inspire people to check out your ad. I would recommend putting a picture in the advert, people are more tempted to open an advert with a picture in it.

    Hope this helps, for more ways to profit online enter your details below: -

  • 0 Comments
  • Filed under: Blog