Rescue Your Website From the Internet “Black Hole”

Issue #2084

• WEALTHY: What’s behind the bizarre behavior of the stock market? (Rick Pendergraft)
• HEALTHY: Do you need this natural stress-fighter? (Dr. Al Sears)
• WISE: Barbra Streisand on appealing to your audience

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

• 5 tips for SEO success (Wendy Montes de Oca)
• A practical way to start your cash-generating machine (Michael Masterson)
• It’s Fun to Know… about the world’s tallest garbage dump
• Add "longueur" to your vocabulary

== Highly Recommended ==

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Wouldn’t that be great?! Of course, the less the number of choices, the more likely your chance of success, right?

How many choices are there when buying and selling shares? Errmm… a LOT! Hundreds… One of the reasons I enjoy such consistent success from trading, is because I only have 6 options to choose from! Except this is even better in a way, because the lottery is pure luck…

… I only have 6 choices AND have a VERY good idea about which choice to make because of the insider signal. Click here to learn more…

The Fed’s Next Move Could Save You Money

By Rick Pendergraft

It seems that good is bad and bad is good in the stock market right now. Better-than-expected reports (showing economic improvement) are taken as a bad sign. Worse-than-expected reports (showing worsening economic conditions) are greeted with a round of cheers.

This bizarre behavior is being exhibited by traders who are trying to guess what the Fed is going to do with interest rates. Inflation is still the Fed’s main concern, or at least that is what they are saying. That supposedly makes the Fed biased toward raising rates. But I personally believe that, deep down, they are worried about the current economic environment. This could mean that the Fed will make a move to lower rates in the next few months, which can save you money… if you have the patience.

In early June, the Producer Price Index (PPI) and Consumer Price Index (CPI) pretty much matched expectations, with core PPI at 0.2 percent and core CPI coming in at 0.1 percent. (Expectations for both were 0.2 percent.) This led numerous politicians and government officials to declare that inflation was dead. But having just paid more than $3 a gallon for mid-grade gas this morning, I beg to differ. Even though the inflation monster hasn’t been slain just yet, I think the Fed needs to change its focus from inflation to growth.

It probably doesn’t matter what the Fed does with the Fed Funds rate, because the market has already spoken and driven the 10-year yield up. And the 10-year yield is more important to the consumer, because lending institutions use it as a barometer for setting their mortgage and auto-loan rates.

So what does all of this mean to you? The selling spree looks overdone, so watch for bonds to rally in the next few months. And while bond prices are rising (bond prices and yields move in the opposite direction, remember), interest rates will be falling - which means that if you are looking to make a major purchase (a house or a car), you might want to wait a few months.

[Ed. Note: Rick Pendergraft is a market expert and two-time winner of the "Top Trader" award at Schaeffer’s Investment Research. Frequently quoted in Reuters, BusinessWeek, Forbes, USA Today, and The New York Times, Rick recently made his debut on Bloomberg television. Find out how he can help you make money - no matter what the market is doing - with ETR’s investment service, The ETF Options Trader.]

"The audience is the best judge of anything."

Barbra Streisand

Rescue Your Website From the Internet "Black Hole"

By Wendy Montes de Oca

Okay, so you have a website. You’ve spent time and money getting this thing up. You’ve used all your creative juices to get the words just right. And you added some nice graphics to make the site aesthetically pleasing. Now what?

A website is of little use if nobody can find it.

Mastering organic search ranking has proven to be a fundamental part of the online marketing mix. (By "organic," I mean the "natural," as opposed to "paid/PPC," listing that appears when someone conducts a search on Google or other search engines. Optimal placement is typically within the first 20 listings or three pages.)

Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) - the ability to increase your site’s visibility in organic search listings and refine the content structure on the site itself - are critical for market awareness and customer acquisition. According to WebProNews, 66.3 percent of searchers click on organic listings before they click on a sponsored link. Even more important, a recent study by CreativeWebsiteMarketing.com indicates that most people who buy online start with a search engine.

Don’t let your site get lost in Internet obscurity. Here are five simple ways to help boost your website’s traffic and optimization.
 
1. Create online buzz about your site, product, or service.

You can do this by generating online press releases. There are services on the Web, such as PRWeb.com or Free-press-release.com, that do this for free or at a nominal cost. Another idea is to post comments to high-traffic blogs, bulletin boards, chat rooms, or forums.

Do a Web search for top blogs or news forums that are related to whatever it is that you’re selling. Go to each site, one by one, and post a comment. (Start a new topic or reply to an existing one.) This helps in two ways: One, you create buzz in the marketplace. Depending on your tactics, your message can even go viral. Two, you get a "back-link" to your site that helps when the site is indexed by search engine spiders.

An important note: Your post should be relevant and genuine. Your comment should be relevant to the question you’re replying to, have some sort of value to the readers that view it, and be in the proper area/subject matter on the forum you’re posting to. Stay away from posts that are blatantly self-serving. These posts are viewed as spam by forum webmasters and could get you banned from the forum, or at least be deleted.

For example, MaryEllen Tribby (ETR’s Publisher) had the good fortune to interview Newt Gingrich in March. Immediately after the interview, we posted a press release to several online press distribution services. We also uploaded comments about the interview to news-aggregating services, blogs, and political forums (with a back-link to the release posted in our Investors Daily Edge archive).

Within the weeks following the initial interview, website visits and traffic ranking more than doubled and conversion also showed a spike. Three months later, this release is still being picked up by the media and through syndication… and the Investors Daily Edge website is enjoying residual traffic and back-links from this effort.

Year-to-date, these techniques and the others I’m about to go into have helped increase traffic nearly 80 percent with a monetization of more than 150 percent ROI.

Which leads me to my next strategy…

2. Initiate a relevant inbound link program.

Set up a reciprocal link page or blog roll (a listing of URLs on a blog, as opposed to a website) that can house links from industry sites. Contact these sites to see if they’d be willing to swap links with you - a link to your site for a link to theirs. Again, relevance is key. Search engines shun link harvesting (collecting links from random websites that have no relevance to your site), so these links should be from sites that are similar in nature to your business.

3. Give Web searchers great content and a link back to your site.

Upload relevant content to sites that make such information available to other sites that want to publish it, such as ArticleDashboard.com or ArticlesFactory.com. This is a great way to increase market awareness as well as establish an inbound link to your site. There is also a syndication opportunity, as third-party sites may come across your article when doing a Web search and republish your content on their own websites. As long as third-parties give your site editorial attribution and a link, getting them to republish your content is just another distribution channel for you to consider.

4. Website pages should be keyword rich and related to your business.

Make a list of your top 20 keywords and variations of those words, and incorporate them into the copy on your site (avoiding the obvious repetition of words). Search engine "spiders" crawl Web pages from top to bottom, so your strongest keywords should be in that order on your home page and sub-pages (the most relevant on the top, the least relevant on the bottom).

You’ll want to do the same for your tagging. Make sure your title tags (the descriptions at the top of each page) and meta tags are unique and chock full of keywords. And your alt tags (images) should have relevant descriptions as well.

5. List your site in online directories by related category or region. 

This is an effective way to increase exposure and get found by prospects searching specifically for information on your product or service by keyword topic. Popular directories (like Business.com) typically have a nominal fee. But there are many other directories (like Dmoz.org, Info.com, and Superpages.com) that are free.

Most important, before you start your SEO initiatives, don’t forget to establish a baseline for your site so you can measure pre- vs. post-SEO tactics. Upload a site counter (which counts the number of visits to your website), obtain your site’s Alexa traffic ranking at Alexa.com, or get your site’s daily visit average (from Google Analytics or another application) - and then chart your weekly progress in Excel. Understand that it typically takes two to three months for a site to be optimized… so be patient. You will eventually see results.

[Ed. Note: Wendy Montes de Oca, MBA, ETR’s VP of Marketing and Business Development, has over 15 years of experience in law, financial services, and marketing. Enjoy the success you’ve always wanted with ETR’s Direct Marketing Quick Start Kit. This 4-CD program is the most effective, quickest, and least-expensive way to move you toward financial independence.]

== Highly Recommended ==

One Simple Step To Make 2007 Your Wealthiest Year Yet

More than any other activity you can do, investing in your ability to achieve your personal dreams is the greatest gift you can give yourself this year.

As we approach Independence Day, ETR has compiled its best Real Estate products and put them into a blowout Fourth of July Celebration SALE. These are our lowest prices ever, guaranteed, so there’s not better time for you to begin working on your goals than now.

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Take a moment to give yourself a distinct advantage NOW!

- Justin Ford

How to Stop Slogging Your Way Through a Corporate Job You Can’t Stand

By Michael Masterson

TJ from Colorado wrote to me recently, asking for advice on how to make money. After declaring bankruptcy last year, he is "back in the corporate world slogging [his] guts out 72 hours a week just to get back to square zero." And, he admits, "I’m too busy earning a living to make any money."

His passion is in the realm of health and fitness. He wants to help people "with life-threatening ailments get and stay well." He’s looking for "a simple, practical way to start earning some fast working capital" that he can "upgrade to higher and bigger cash generators" and that can eventually be run on "auto-pilot mode."

Here is my advice to anyone in TJ’s position: You must begin by facing a few facts.

First Fact: you need knowledge and capital to start a business. If you don’t have much knowledge, you need to invest a lot of money to hire the expertise you lack.

Second Fact: You are working 72 hours a week. That doesn’t leave you much time.

Third Fact: You don’t have any money.

Fourth and Most Depressing Fact: If you have neither knowledge nor money, you can’t reasonably expect to start a successful business.

The Good News: You can get the knowledge you need, some of the capital you want, and valuable business contacts to supply the rest by becoming what I call a "chicken entrepreneur."

A chicken entrepreneur is somebody who is smart enough to know when he needs to be chicken. Instead of jumping into some sexy-sounding business as an outsider, he takes a safer, smarter path that allows him to make valuable contacts and earn money while he is gaining the knowledge he needs to be successful.

This is the path for you.

You need to get another job, working for a growing company that is doing something you can do on your own. If you like health and fitness, go to work for a company in that business. But make sure you find a fast-growing and profitable company to join.

Next, become their best employee - focusing on sales and marketing - even if you have to start as a shipping clerk and work your way up. When you get to the point where you are the company’s number one marketer, then you will have the knowledge you need to start your own business.

At that point, go to your boss and try to get him to back you in your own venture. (I explain how to do this in Automatic Wealth for Grads.) If your employer demurs, no problem. You’ll already have the contacts to go out on your own. Some of those contacts will believe in you because they have seen you do your thing. Some of the people who believe in you will have money. Pick one of them you trust… then go to it.

That’s the short version. Read my books and past issues of ETR for specific advice.

DHEA: Your Body’s Anti-Stress Hormone

By Al Sears, MD

Last week, DR, a new patient in my clinic, told me she was feeling overwhelmed and had trouble focusing on her work. Her original doctor had given her anti-depressants, but she had come to me hoping for a better alternative.

You may not realize it, but stress and anxiety have a hormonal connection. And, indeed, when DR’s tests came back, her cortisol (stress hormone) levels were through the roof - and her DHEA barely registered.

I call DHEA the "anti-stress hormone." The most abundant product of the adrenal glands, it helps your body produce hormones like testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone. You have a lot of those hormones when you’re young, but production dwindles with age. By the time you are 65 years old, you’ll only have about 10 percent of the DHEA you had when you were 20.

People with higher levels of DHEA experience:

• Less stress
• Reduced body fat
• Enhanced energy
• Increased libido
• A boost in immune system function
• Sharper memory
• A reversal of wrinkles and signs of physical aging

It is important to get your DHEA levels checked. Your doctor can do this by performing a simple blood test. Youthful levels of DHEA for men range from 400 to 560. For women, levels range from 350 to 430.

After your levels have been checked, you can determine how much DHEA to take. I often use a starting dose of 10 mg daily. DHEA is absorbed well and can be taken at any time, but is best taken first thing in the morning in order to mimic the natural daily fluctuations in your body’s levels.

DHEA is becoming more popular as a supplement, and I regularly use DHEA therapy at my clinic to treat patients who suffer from lack of energy, depression, and chronic fatigue syndrome.

What’s more, DHEA is very affordable. Surf the Internet and do some comparison shopping. I recently found 300 capsules - at the 10 mg dose - for just $14.99.

[Ed. Note: Dr. Sears is a practicing physician and an expert on heart health. Learn how to apply his winning heart-healthy strategies in The Doctor’s Heart Cure.]

It’s Fun to Know: The World’s Tallest Garbage Dump

An estimated 50 tons of garbage, including oxygen bottles and climbing gear, litters the slopes of Mt. Everest, the result of half a century of mountaineering. A Japanese climber started a clean-up campaign in 2000, and on his fifth and most recent trip he brought down about 1,100 pounds of trash with the help of two other climbers and 12 Sherpas.

The Nepalese government recently cracked down on litterers on the mountain, requiring expeditions to pay a $4,000 fine if they leave anything behind.

(Source: Associated Press)

== Highly Recommended ==

How I Went from Working in the Sub- Sub-Basement of a Bank in Minneapolis… to Living on a Small Island in Maine in the House of My Dreams!

Money in the bank, the house you’ve always wanted, and the freedom to enjoy it all. That is the “American Dream”!

Can you still achieve it?

Absolutely… The best way left for you to achieve that dream is by starting your own business.

But how do you get started? What do you do?

We hear questions like these daily. So here is what we did. We’ve done all the hard work for you.

We’ve researched hundreds of the best businesses out there and we report on only the best. The ones that make real money and are the easiest to start.

We’ve done all the hard work. All you have to do is connect the dots. Ask yourself what you like to do and how much money you want to make.

It couldn’t be any easier. Click here to read on…

- Patrick Coffey

Word to the Wise: Longueur

"Longueur" (long-GUR) - French for "length" - is a dull, tedious passage in a book, play, musical composition, etc.

Example (as used by Peter Ackroyd in a London Times review of Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family, and Affections, by Frances Spalding): "If this book of 400 pages had been devoted to her alone, it would have been filled with longueurs, but as the biography of a family it has the merit of originality."

[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker … build your self-confidence and intellect … increase your attractiveness to others … just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR’s new Words to the Wise CD Library.]

Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007