About a year and a half ago, a family friend started a business selling women’s active wear. She had no website — and no plans to create one.

She sold her goods by driving door to door, visiting every gym she could find. She was doing okay. But the time and effort — not to mention gas — she was putting into it was crazy.

Her products were great, and the people who purchased them were always happy to buy from her again. But her only follow-up with them was by phone. She worked out of her tiny two-bedroom house. And because she couldn’t afford to have someone else handle order fulfillment, there were so many boxes piled up that you could hardly walk through the house without tripping over one.

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“I’ve read that a website or blog needs original content to get ranked higher by the search engines. If I use content from ETR’s newsletters/website on my blog, will that hurt my Google ranking and keep me from getting traffic?”

Anita Funkhouser

Keyser, WV

Dear Anita,

Using third-party content DOES NOT hurt your rankings. The reason Web marketers make such an issue about duplicate content is that only the original creator of the content gets the full SEO (search engine optimization) value from it. In other words, if you use articles from Early to Rise, you won’t rank as well for the content as we at ETR would.

Let’s say you republish one of our articles about satellite sites. (more…)

Early to Rise is always giving subscribers helpful advice on Web marketing and how to generate business online. But one thing we haven’t said much about is Web hosting and how it can affect your sales.

A Web host is a company that provides server (computer) space for your website – for a “modest” monthly fee. Think of it as the landlord of the building where your website lives.

And you don’t want to take this service for granted. One of the things you need to consider when you are developing your marketing initiatives is the Web hosting provider for your company’s portal. Choosing the wrong one can give you a major headache.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean… (more…)

With 200 million and 125 million users respectively, Facebook and MySpace have got marketers everywhere frothing at the mouth. “Look at all those potential customers!” they say. “How can we harness the overwhelming popularity of these sites to our benefit?”

Alexis Siemon has written before about marketing your business via social networking websites like these. Usually, that means interacting with members of the network, answering questions, leaving comments, and branding yourself as an expert in your field.

And now, (more…)

You may have noticed that ETR’s email newsletter looks a little different these days…

Some might even say it looks “boring.”

But we say “Boring is better!”

Some of the more “exciting” features of our e-mails were preventing them from reaching our subscribers. (Maybe even you!) So we’ve made a few changes to ETR – to make sure you get it in your inbox every morning.

And by making your own e-mails more “boring,” you could see more subscribers receiving and opening them. Which, in the end, should result in more sales.

You see, the most important thing about an e-mail newsletter is not how “pretty” it looks or how “flashy” the design is. The most important thing is the content. The innovative ideas and useful techniques that made readers subscribe in the first place. (more…)