Although Chitika has been around since 1993, not many pople were aware of them in the website marketing business, in fact, I myself didn’t realize of there existence until I saw people start bragging about how much money they were making of off them, even over Adsense.
So, what’s the big deal? You may ask. Well that’s pretty simple actually, Chitika has invented a revolutionary ad-type called eMiniMaills. These eMiniMalls are banner sized shopping cart displaying items that you choose by keywords, and you get paid for every click on the ads.
Chitika introduced eMiniMalls in June of ’05, but people really started to utilize them quite recently, and started to realize the true power that they held over the common consumer. From most, if not all, reports that I’ve seen, most people’s Chitika earnings have surpassed there Adsense earnings by a large amount, and this is no small feat.
Now that I’ve made you all aware of how it all works, and true power of eMiniMalls, let’s get into the nitty gritty. You’ll obviously want to start out with a website, or a blog, in fact, any median will do, and is needed. You’ll then want to sign up for an account here. (https://chitika.com)
Now that you have an account, you’ll want to create the adds that you’ll be displaying on your site, this is almost like your creating your adsense ads and the same rules apply, we’ll discuss this more a little later. Unlike adsense you can’t save color schemes so you may want to write the colors down so you can use them in the future for any other ads.
When deciding colors for your adds, you’ll want to try your best to blend them in to your existing website, color wise. It has been proven that those people that have successfully blended there ads into their site via good colors, have has a higher click-through-rate, and thus higher earnings. Try your hand at this and see how it works out. If you’d like an example of how I did the colors compared to my site, you can visit Super Justin.com. (http://www.superjustin.com).
Another important factor to take into consideration is ad placement, I find that the better ad placement, the better click-through-rate. It’s hard to determine which would best suite every site, because every site is different, so you’ll want to test this out as much as you can through trial and error. Some key things to consider is that you’ll want to have your ads in high traffic areas, such as menus as well as site articles.
In closing, don’t forget to use chitika’s great referral program after you sign up, and give your friends and relatives, so you can earn money from them as well. Click here to sign up. (https://chitika.com)
SEO Packages | Web Marketing Company
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Why Your Web Designer Should Know About Web Marketing
Many excellent web designers know next to nothing of web marketing, and this can be a big problem. Marketing a site in search engines requires that the site be designed in a search engine compatible format. Many beautiful sites do not fare well in search engines at all simply because of the way they have been designed. Here are some things web designers should know about web marketing.
Load Times
Beautiful sites with lots of graphics may look awesome, but are often so slow to download that web visitors, particularly on dial-up connections, will simply go elsewhere before the site even finishes downloading. Some search engines also may penalize sites for being to slow.
File Names
When designing a site, all of the file names of the site should be representative of what's on each page. File names like page_1.html are not helpful in conveying what is on the page. Search engines look for sites that are relevant and that are clear about the information being provided. Descriptive, yet short names, like web_marketing_design.php tell not only search engines spiders what's on a page, but humans as well.
URLs
Similar to file names, URLs should be created in formats that that are meaningful to humans and search engines. Often URLs are a combination of domain names, directory names and file names. All of these elements should be descriptive of what's on the site, the directory and the page respectively.
Also, many shopping cart use URLs such as http://www.somesite.com/store/index.php?pid=2786247642. Looking at this URL, neither search engine nor human can determine the contents of the page. http://www.somesite.com/store/widgets.php?product=sky_hook_widgets is much better. It seems most major search engines will now index pages with question marks in the URL, yet this may still hinder some smaller search engines. Shopping carts that do not use question marks in the URL are available and make for cleaner looking URLs that are easier to remember, such as http://www.somedomain.com/store/sky_widgets.
Alt Tags
Alt tags are displayed when graphics have been turned off. A surfer may turn off graphics to get better Internet speed or may rely on alt tags because of physical impairment. This is probably why search engines still seem to weigh alt tags into their search ranking algorithms. Many web designers leave alt tags blank, when in fact they could be populated with keyword laden and accurate descriptions of the images.
Usability
There are certain elements that users of the web have come to expect of the sites they encounter. Examples would be Home and Contact buttons. Have you ever been to a web site and found yourself digging for the Home or especially the Contact button? I don't know about you, but I find this quite annoying. Ahh… What a breathe of fresh air to go to a web site and find the menu in the same location on every page and have the first button be Home and the last button Contact. Mmmm, I get warm just thinking about it. Yet, designers are driven by aesthetics and beauty. "How boring to always have the same menu format!" might be one web artist's cry. Boring - perhaps. Easy to use? Yes. When it comes to marketing and web sites, easy-to-use goes a long way toward making a sale.
Meta Tags
Commonly Web designers will put the same meta tags on every page of a site. This is not nearly as effective at getting ranked in the search engines as focusing the meta tags of each page to a few specific and accurate keywords on the page. The goal of search engines is to bring relevant data to its users. Having page specific meta tags is another way of showing not just search engines, but your visitors as well, exactly what your page is about. This makes finding your pages that much easier.
Generally, before designing a site, it is a good idea to determine your keywords first. Determining your keywords is the topic of another article altogether. Once keywords have been determined, the site can be designed in such a way as to focus most on those keywords, in the domain name, directory names, file names, the menu names, the alt tags and meta tags. Designing your keywords into your site will give you a huge advantage over many competitors and is much easier than designing keywords into a site after it has been designed.
SEO Packages | Web Marketing Company
Load Times
Beautiful sites with lots of graphics may look awesome, but are often so slow to download that web visitors, particularly on dial-up connections, will simply go elsewhere before the site even finishes downloading. Some search engines also may penalize sites for being to slow.
File Names
When designing a site, all of the file names of the site should be representative of what's on each page. File names like page_1.html are not helpful in conveying what is on the page. Search engines look for sites that are relevant and that are clear about the information being provided. Descriptive, yet short names, like web_marketing_design.php tell not only search engines spiders what's on a page, but humans as well.
URLs
Similar to file names, URLs should be created in formats that that are meaningful to humans and search engines. Often URLs are a combination of domain names, directory names and file names. All of these elements should be descriptive of what's on the site, the directory and the page respectively.
Also, many shopping cart use URLs such as http://www.somesite.com/store/index.php?pid=2786247642. Looking at this URL, neither search engine nor human can determine the contents of the page. http://www.somesite.com/store/widgets.php?product=sky_hook_widgets is much better. It seems most major search engines will now index pages with question marks in the URL, yet this may still hinder some smaller search engines. Shopping carts that do not use question marks in the URL are available and make for cleaner looking URLs that are easier to remember, such as http://www.somedomain.com/store/sky_widgets.
Alt Tags
Alt tags are displayed when graphics have been turned off. A surfer may turn off graphics to get better Internet speed or may rely on alt tags because of physical impairment. This is probably why search engines still seem to weigh alt tags into their search ranking algorithms. Many web designers leave alt tags blank, when in fact they could be populated with keyword laden and accurate descriptions of the images.
Usability
There are certain elements that users of the web have come to expect of the sites they encounter. Examples would be Home and Contact buttons. Have you ever been to a web site and found yourself digging for the Home or especially the Contact button? I don't know about you, but I find this quite annoying. Ahh… What a breathe of fresh air to go to a web site and find the menu in the same location on every page and have the first button be Home and the last button Contact. Mmmm, I get warm just thinking about it. Yet, designers are driven by aesthetics and beauty. "How boring to always have the same menu format!" might be one web artist's cry. Boring - perhaps. Easy to use? Yes. When it comes to marketing and web sites, easy-to-use goes a long way toward making a sale.
Meta Tags
Commonly Web designers will put the same meta tags on every page of a site. This is not nearly as effective at getting ranked in the search engines as focusing the meta tags of each page to a few specific and accurate keywords on the page. The goal of search engines is to bring relevant data to its users. Having page specific meta tags is another way of showing not just search engines, but your visitors as well, exactly what your page is about. This makes finding your pages that much easier.
Generally, before designing a site, it is a good idea to determine your keywords first. Determining your keywords is the topic of another article altogether. Once keywords have been determined, the site can be designed in such a way as to focus most on those keywords, in the domain name, directory names, file names, the menu names, the alt tags and meta tags. Designing your keywords into your site will give you a huge advantage over many competitors and is much easier than designing keywords into a site after it has been designed.
SEO Packages | Web Marketing Company
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