Sunday, June 8, 2008

Strategies To Reduce Your Monthly Bills

Monthly bills have you dazed and confused? This site can help save your sanity and some of your hard earned money. From credit card debt, insurance premiums, mortgage refinance and home equity loans, and transportation costs. Explains how to reduce credit card debt and where to turn in case you are over your head. If your are in serious credit card debt and are late on payments and have creditors calling, there is help available. Credit Counseling Center of America is a non profit organization that helps people reduce or eliminate unsecured debt, personal loans, and medical bills. CCCA does not loan money, the simply consolidate your loans and negotiate lower interest rates with your creditors.

Your participation in CCCA will help restore your credit rating by:

*Bringing past due accounts up to date

*Stopping creditor harassment

*Keeping payments current

*Settlement of seriously overdue and delinquent accounts

*Over-the-limit and late fees are absorbed

Another way to reduce interest charges is to take out a Home Equity loan on your house. Home Equity loans have a much lower APR thus reducing your payment. You can lengthen the term to 10 or 15 years so so you will have a very small payment. If you do this, do not charge the credit cards back up to MAX. You may also opt to take out a debt consolidation loan from your bank if you dont own a house.

Be careful of credit repair scams and credit "doctors" that claim to "repair your credit" for a fee. No one can repair credit. Negative information such as charge-offs, late pay, slow pay, abandonment and no pays can (and will) stay on your credit report for 7 years. There is no person or company that can remove this information from your credit report, except for the lenders who filed the derogatory information. A credit report cannot be changed or altered, however, bringing your accounts up to date restores your credit. You are the only person who can restore your credit, and there is never a fee for restoring your own credit.

If you budget accordingly and can make the payments or your own, or if your choose to go with a non-profit debt consolidator, be sure that you never again allow yourself to become a slave to your debts! Always pay by cash or check. If you must make a credit card purchase, write a check for the amount and send it to the credit card company the same day.

Download the Financial Fitness Fact Sheet for furthur help in budgeting your credit card debt. .

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Managing Director of Reviews, LLC. College graduate of SMU with major in Marketing. Primary objective is to educate and inform the global community of Internet Marketing Strategies and income possibilities as well as intricacies of personal finance.

http://www.chillmybills.com

Article Marketing & Copywriting Secret: How To Make Your Article TITLE Sell

Most authors are wasting their time producing dozens to hundreds of high quality articles that never reach a fraction of their traffic potential. It's a darn shame.

When I review the behind-the-scenes traffic statistics on over 20,000 articles that have produced over 1 million monthly page views in my article marketing lab...ONE thing is clear: All articles are not created equal even when everything about them is identical except for the TITLE.

The reason is probably not what you think.

If you've been schooled on traditional copywriting, you know that in the offline world, the headline determines as much as 95% of the success of the book or article. This statistic takes into consideration what makes the book title successful: Whether a human buys it or not.

Article Marketing on the Internet is a whole different story because of the way your articles reach humans who have an interest in them.

MYTH: Most people will read your articles because they came to a website and started browsing just like they do if they were to have gone to a local book store to find a book of personal interest.

FACT: Wrong! Most people will search the Internet using one of the major search engines and they will be putting in between 1 to 5 keywords that are related to the topic of the article or information they are looking to locate. The search engines will then deliver results that best match the human's interest.

YOUR GOAL: To have your articles show up in the search engine results for the keywords and topics that are most related to the content of your article.

HOW?

You must embrace this TITLE creation & traffic-building truth:

The first 3-5 words of your TITLE determine the success of your article in terms of how much traffic your article will generate back to your website. Success can only be had when you create keyword rich titles for your articles that match the most commonly searched keywords for your topic.

How to determine which keywords are rich and the right ones to use for your article?

You'll need a keyword research tool. Some are free and some are fee-based. Overture.com has a popular keyword research tool that shows you the most common search results from the Yahoo search engines directory. If you want to see what's on "Google's Mind" you can try one of their current beta tools called "Google Suggest": http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&complete=1

Whether you use a web-based keyword research tool or invest in one of the more advanced application level software keyword research tools, it's critical that you learn know how to do keyword research.

A "Good" vs. "Bad" TITLE Example:

Here is an example of the difference between a non-keyword rich TITLE vs. a very keyword rich TITLE that is proven to perform better in terms of traffic creation:

Bad TITLE Example:

"Top 9 Ways You Can Acquire Fractional Jet Ownership"

Excellent Keyword Rich Title Example:

Fractional Jet Ownership - 9 Strategies to Help You Acquire Your Private Jet

Why is it more effective?

Because it does not waste the first 3 words of the title with meaningless garbage words like "top" or the number "9" or "ways"...and gets right to the important words that might be found when someone is using a search engine to research a topic related to your article.

You'll also notice in my example that I included the word "Private" Jet. Why? Because my keyword research said that people who search for fractional jet also search for the word "private jet" and therefore I wanted to boost the chances that my title would be found by a larger number of potential visitors to the article.

Two recommendations on what NOT to do:

1) Don't include garbage characters in your TITLE such as quotes, tildes, asterisks or anything else that a search engines has to work hard to discard in order to understand the TITLE of your article.

2) Do not engage in any search engine spam technique by having keyword rich TITLES that have nothing to do with the topic of your article. You'll only be hurting yourself as the search engines already aggressively filter out bad behavior like this.

YOUR INTELLIGENT KEYWORD RICH TITLE COPYWRITING CONCLUSION:

If you want to maximize your results from any article marketing strategy, you must master keyword research so that you can create keyword rich and intelligent article TITLES. Your pay off will be massive amounts of traffic to your articles and website thanks to the search engines who love smart keyword rich TITLES!

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best quality original articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ expert author community. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links intact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

(c) Copyright - Christopher M. Knight. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Directory Techniques for Link Building

One of the most time and cost effective methods of Search Engine Optimization is though the use of directory submissions. When online businesses want a way to effectively promote and gain exposure for their websites they turn to quality web directories. There are many other articles and blog posts all across the internet documenting the benefits of link popularity and the use of web directories. By submitting sites for review at quality web directories you can obtain relevant, quality inbound links to your website to help improve search engine results and traffic to your website.

What a quality directory does is human reviews of available websites to determine their quality and if the site meets directory standards list them in the most relevant category to the site content. When directory visitors are searching for sites based on content they will find relevant sites and be directed to them. This will result in direct traffic to your website. This results in increasing your sites reach and exposure to internet traffic.

Other benefits of quality directory submission include link building benefits.

When you increase the number of quality inbound links to your website through directory submissions, it opens more doorways to your website for traffic to find you. This traffic is more relevant which means higher conversion rates along with more visibility.

The increased link popularity you achieve with quality directory submissions will also help you gain better search engine positioning for relevant searches. Directories of quality are frequently crawled by all major search engines which will quickly find your link, follow it and index your site. By having a listing there your site will gain exposure to all the major search engines. Increasing the visibility of your site to search engines on quality directories will mean more frequent indexing of your site to pick up new content and improve search result rankings for those relevant terms.

If you use relevant keywords in your link text without spamming your link building efforts can be amplified as the keywords within the links will be seen as relevant to the content of your site and result in higher rankings for those relevant searches. That means the traffic that is directed towards your website will be targeted towards your sites content.

That means by submitting your website to quality web directories you can brand your websites products and services by using your brand in the anchor text of your links. Just like with targeting keywords, this targets and builds company and brand awareness to your clients and customers.

One thing you should be aware of when conducting a directory submission campaign is that there are many different types of web directories available on the internet. Most are of a lesser quality which will limit the results you achieve with them. If you focus on well maintained and promoted directories you will achieve much better and quicker results with less effort. We all know that in this day and age time is a valuable commodity. Just below you will find a link to another article that can further explain the different types of directories and how to tell quality.

You can learn more about the Different Types of Directories and the Distinctive Traits of a Quality Web Directory in these articles brought to you by the Authority Web Directory.

Article Marketing - Hook The Reader

Article marketing is an advertising technique. An engaging article is used to hook the reader, and provide basic information and education. The articles are succinct and quickly pull the reader in. By providing the reader with a start, they can help the reader to locate additional information and services of interest to them. Article marketing is a new but powerful approach to business.

By utilizing the tactical placement of words, the article that was written is flagging what is known as the internet spiders, all while the reader is being engaged. If these keywords are placed just right, the site will gain a high rank with the search engines but not seem overly wordy or riddled with keywords.

If you are able to write one of these articles a day, you will be a great asset to your company. Adding these articles each day will make your rating on various search engines go up. You do not have to do very much work to make your business look good and gain new visitors with article marketing.

The most important thing to remember when you are going to use article marketing for your website is that you must use unique articles each time you post something new. Copies of articles and anything that is not unique content will not help you gain a higher rating or customer base. Customers do not want to see the same old thing everywhere that they look.

To this end, it is important to create a new and fresh article each day. This will keep your old readers interested and will make your business look experienced to your new readers. The more people that are interested in your articles, the more likely you are to sell more products. In the end, you gain profit.

As a growing area of marketing nowadays, the use of articles is a highly successful approach to selling products or services. Be sure to publish fresh ideas which haven't been published elsewhere online. Doing this will enable you both to realize a profit and increase your rating in the popular search engines with a minimum of effort.

Article marketing is a new way of advertising. These articles are very interesting and designed to hook the reader. This is a new and very strong approach to the world of business. All articles written are very unique articles, you must make sure that the article are unique to keep readers interested. Another key factor is unique content, which is just as important to keep the readers hooked. You want to make sure that the articles are interesting and grab attention. They must also keep the readers attention so that customers keep coming back.

Best SEO Practices - How to Increase Your Search Engine Rankings

The best SEO practices used to increase your search engine rankings may seem daunting, so you have probably avoided using this powerful system on your website. A site ranked high is assured of more visitors and subsequently more sales. If you have been looking for a way to kick-start your internet business it is imperative to begin working on this immediately.

Most people looking for goods and services online find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and a few others. Optimizing your web pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted prospects to your website. This will increase the chances of these prospects of becoming customers. Your goal should be to have your web pages show up as high on the search results as possible, because this will provide an increase in traffic.

How do I optimize my website?

Title Bar - is on your homepage and it is the colored bar at the top of the page.

To increase search engine rankings, the words on your title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your business name. This should also be done on the other pages as well. The keywords or phrases relating to the information on the page should match up perfectly.

Side note - avoid very long strings of keywords by keeping them to six words or less.

Also, keep away from excessive keyword duplication in the title bar, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other. The copy on the page should have the keywords spaced out as long as it does not affect the information negatively.

Content - search engines mostly list sites that contain quality content rather than snazzy graphics. The text on your site must contain the most significant keywords - the words that potential customers will be entering into search engines that will lead to your website.

250 words on each page should be the minimum unless design of your site works better with less. 100 carefully chosen words would probably be enough, but it must be totally keyword enhanced without overdoing it.

Side note - search engines must be able to read the text, so the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

Meta Tags - is simple code that does not have the power some people believe, but it is worth adding them because some search engines may use meta tags in their ranking method.

Side note - to find out if your web pages are set up with meta tags, you must access the code by doing the following:

  1. click the "view" button on the browser menu bar
  2. select "source." (this will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page)
  3. if there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window

    • a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=

If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Link Popularity - this is an extremely important factor based on search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank a website. Link popularity is based on the quality of sites linked to from the links page.

Side note - if you want to find out what sites are linked to your site you will find some great tools online by searching the term "free link popularity check" and once you find out the negative or positive impact those sites may have on yours then you can respond accordingly. If you have a lack of or low quality links you should highly consider a link popularity campaign immediately by doing the following:

  1. contact quality sites and request they exchange links with your site
  2. checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with
  3. link to popular and quality sites

This will not only elevate your search engine rankings, but it will also bring more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful online marketing campaign. By review the information above and performing these best SEO practices you should be able to make major strides in bringing more quality prospects to your web pages.

Discover 4 Good Reasons Why Attracting Organic Search Engine Traffic Makes Increasing Sales As Easy As Shooting Fish In A Barrel! http://bestseopractices.googlepages.com - Get a popular SEO free report while you are there.

Best SEO Practices

(c) Copyright - Jimmy Adames. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

4 Reasons Why You Need Testimonials to Sell More

The other day I was writing a sales brochure for a West Coast manufacturer. As I got to what Ill call the proof section of the brochure, I was rummaging around for testimonials. The company already had a full-blown Web site and a solid PowerPoint presentation. So I was hopeful that Id find some ready made testimonials or at least some material I could use to create some.

As it turned out, they had one case study with a couple of customer quotes. I pieced together the material to create one measly testimonial. It was less than adequate.

Well, maybe its no big deal. After all, I wrote strong copy. Why even bother with testimonials? Ill give you four good reasons.

1. Credibility

Testimonials give your company, product, or service credibility. Everyone is bombarded with advertising messages every day. Its a brutal marketplace. If you want to sell something to somebody, you stand a much better chance if you can convince them that youre credible. Testimonials are like references on a resume. Theyre the people who vouch for you.

2. Identification

Your prospects identify with your customers who are providing the testimonials. They have similar concerns, problems, hopes and desires. They commiserate. This is good. You want this in your marketing. (Sorry, but your prospects dont identify with you. Not really. Youre trying to sell them something!)

3. Proof

Proof, alone, is reason enough to gather and use testimonials. This is where your customers say, in effect, Theyre right, Mr. or Ms. Prospect. They can save you 50% ... or make you feel 18 again ... or make you enough money to retire at 50. They did it for me and Im thrilled! Testimonials notarize your marketing speak.

4. Closure

Testimonials help close the sale. Sure, they can be used throughout a marketing piece. But they definitely come in handy toward the end. Youve introduced the problem or need, your product or service, the features and benefits, and more. Then you line up your testimonials, all the customers whose heads are nodding and saying, Yep, it worked for me. Soon after, you ask for the order.

For many reasons, testimonials give your prospects the confidence they need to buy from you for the first time. And once your prospects turn into new customers, the door to repeat sales swings wide open.

(c) 2005 Neil Sagebiel

Neil Sagebiel is a former senior copywriter for a Seattle B2B ad agency and publisher of a monthly ezine, Headlines from Floyd.