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By mark, August 5, 2010 1:02 pm

Microsoft Outlook is a great email client and makes using those POP 3 email accounts easy enough for anyone.  Trouble with POP 3 accounts is once you start creating them you can end up with a sizable number of different email accounts like admin, jobs, contact, service, or whatever all @yoursite.com.  Eventually you will want to organize all these accounts into their own folders to make dealing with them easier.

Choose which accounts you want to be completely separate and which you would like to come to the main inbox.  Having personal correspondence all go to a single inbox regardless of the email account makes it harder to miss a message.

Open the Account Settings dialogue by going to Tabs then Account Settings.  In this box there are seven tabs, the first being E-mail.  Here you find all accounts managed by Outlook in the order they were created.

Assign or create a folder where you want the email to land for each account.   Highlight one of the accounts you want incoming mail to be segregated to its own folder.  Near the bottom of the dialogue box is the “change Folder” button; click this button.  A new dialogue box will open where you can choose an existing or create a new folder for the mail to be deposited.  One note on this; subfolders do not sound an alert for new mail as would main level folders like the Inbox.  If you want alerts for new mail to sound, create new folders directly within the personal folders level.  Click OK and repeat for each email account as desired.

Create rules for incoming mail at the inbox level.  Creating subfolders in the inbox is a great way of organizing correspondence and rules can automate the process of moving mail to those folders.  Like most actions there are multiple ways to access the “Create Rule” but my favorite is simply a right click on a message and choosing the Create Rule option from the list.  The Dialogue box will auto fill with some of the specifics of the email message you right clicked and provide a checkbox method of setting the desired rule and results; use the Advanced Options button for even more detailed options.

Using rules will also help with filtering junk messages that find a way past your junk mail filters and sounding alerts for special messages.  Become familiar with what rules can and find yourself an organized Outlook user.

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By rich, July 24, 2010 7:56 am

Affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative opportunities on the internet.  You don’t need any experience and the merchant normally gives you all the sales tools you need.

There is also minimal risk involved, if the product you are advertising is not making money then you can simply drop it and choose another, there are no long-term contracts binding you to a particular merchant. Being an affiliate is about making money selling other people’s services or products by using online advertising.

Affiliate programs are an excellent way to make money, the programs should be free to join and there are thousands of products and services for you to choose from. As an affiliate you advertise for the product and earn commission each time someone clicks on the link, visits the merchant’s site and proceeds to make a purchase. Do your homework when it comes to an affiliate program so that you can be more informed, trust me, you will benefit from it in the end.

However marketing affiliate programs isn’t always as easy as it sounds, after all, if getting traffic to a site was so easy why would merchants need affiliates?  Success in affiliate marketing can take some time and hard work, but once you have figured it out its well worth it.  The work is keeping on top of new trends on how to get that targeted traffic that makes you money.

Many affiliate programs still want to see your website to make sure it is relevant to their products, but with article marketing and so many other techniques, not all affiliates even have their own website.  The most successful have many but that’s not the point.  If you have a relevant website it means you might just know a little about that product.  You don’t have to know everything about the product or service you are marketing but it sure helps to have a clue.  If you write an article about a new software product and sound exactly like the box it comes in you will likely be overlooked.

My favorite method of affiliate marketing is article writing.  I much prefer writing about the things i know and care about like the latest computer processor rather than the newest fashion in shoes.  When you write about your passions it always shows.

Good luck!

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By mark, March 15, 2010 10:58 am

This was an interesting question to me because they are so very related.  I went looking for another point of view on the subject and found this short explanation from a SEO service website.

“Blogs have arrived as a means to get your message across in a personal way. Articles are usually considered to be more informative and accurate where details are concerned. From a search engine perspective, both are a great source of information. But which one to rank better?

First, let’s look at the value each one brings:

Blogs:

Timely, personal, have “inside point of view” usually updated on a frequent basis

Articles:

Informative, Authorative, detailed, marketing driven.

From a freshness perspective, Blogs clearly win out over the articles.

Exposure:
Unless your blog is highly ranked, the articles will get more exposure, since there are more chances of your article being seen by more people. There are many sources on the internet that you can submit your articles to, here is a link for some: seoresources.seoforgoogle.com

From a business perspective, I can tell you that articles help re-enforce what you are selling. By writing an article instead of a blog, there is a perception that more care is taken to writing an article, therefore the information contained within is worth more.

People know that a blog will have a personal spin to it, whether the author is blasting a company, or promoting something that they have a personal or professional interest in.

From my own trials, no one has made any purchases for any product being pushed in a blog, but instead there has a distinguishable influx of sales that can be directly traced back to an article.

So what does this mean to you?

If you have a product or service you want to promote, use an article. If you need to get something off your chest, create a blog. While both are thought of very well by the search engines, you’re ultimate goal is to convert the user, not confuse the search engines.

-To your online success!”

Paul Bliss
www.SEOforGoogle.com

Now what I didn’t see there was the relationship between blogs and articles.  I personally like to own what I write; and so do most other writers.  Consider writing your article, posting it to your blog, re-writing the same article to be original, then submitting that to the article directories.  This way you get back links  to your site and there isn’t any duplicate content penalty.

mark

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By rich, February 2, 2010 12:13 pm

Do SEO experts agree on anything? The more you look into how to optimize your website the more confusing it seems to be.  Pay-per-click, articles, keywords, tags, phrases, niches… it never seems to end. Strategies to improve your page rank abound and many of these strategies are being held as confidential.  Seems silly since its not really a secret and anyone can learn this stuff.  Trouble is, by keeping this stuff mysterious, so-called SEO experts can charge a hefty fee and never guarantee results or reveal exactly what was done.  It’s the old “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance… Baffle ‘em with BS” routine.   I can quickly get a top place on Google if I want a search term so obscure no one will ever use it except me; just to say I have the #1 spot.

Here are five things that have and will continue to work to help you out a bit.

Leverage.  The single most effective way to get Google to notice your site is to be bookmarked at a social bookmarking site.  Having links is extremely helpful if the links are to reputable sites. You can leverage the Google friendly sites like these bookmarking monsters and get a great boost.  A plethora of links to poor quality sites just looks like someone gaming the system my buying them.  Google punishes this behavior.  I would say that means don’t waste your money on paid backlinks.  There are so many plugins available to make this easy and you should find one that offers links to every popular social bookmarking site.

Downloadable content and video.  Google doesn’t care how good your video is or what your downloadable content is but does care that people want it.  If you have content on your site that visitors want and are willing to download, Google will take notice and give your site “brownie points”.  Don’t forget to make the content relevant to the keywords you choose.  There are plenty of ‘gurus’ out there talking about video but frequently they are hawking a particular service. Turning a PowerPoint into a video with Windows Movie Maker can be done by a 12 yr old.  The production simply has to be on topic and available.  Depending on the purpose of the site you can offer free downloadable eBooks like how-to’s.  It’s not hard to find PLR (Private License Rights) articles you can offer on about any subject.

Don’t wait for Googlebots. One mistake people make is they assume Google will do all the work for them. Google likes xml sitemaps (http://www.sitemaps.org/) to easily index your site.  What many website managers do is get all the stuff in place then wait for the Googlebots to come along and notice them.  If you go through all the work to get your architecture right why wouldn’t you take the final step and just submit that sitemap to Google yourself?  It instigates those important bots to come back for another visit.  Do this every time there is a change or update to the site.

Use search terms properly.  when I started making websites silly things like Meta didn’t mean a lot to me.  Tags and key phrases are those things I assumed were too technical for me then.  I might change the information just enough to show up in the tab but never really understood what this did.  Each page of a website should have a unique tag that identifies the page’s key phrase.  A machinist website may have a page on bearings.  That page should be optimized to bearings and not the same general term as the home page.  It’s simply a matter of labeling everything the right way.

120001454.jpg anyone?? Everyone loves to put pictures on their site.  If your pictures have generic default numerical names then Google has no idea what they are.  Think of the description of a picture as brail for Google.  Google doesn’t have eyes to see a picture but does take notice of the file name and alternate text.  If you have a site about fish you want pictures of fish there; not numbers.  The alternate text should be the same as the file name.