Advertisers motivate content developers

Myles Felsing, director of online marketing at gift Retailer RedEnvelope, says, "For us as an upscale gift retailer, there's just not a lot of general articles out there talking about gifts." In fact what we have found in our research studying the marriage of content and ebusiness is that there is no incentive to create content for many nano-publishers when there are no advertisers. (Related article: Advertisers need to be part of both AdSense and AdWords if they want publishers to mention their products)

There is another reason why Felsing is wrong. There are Adsense advertisers for all kinds of high-end products. Some examples are private jets, online trading, online banking, retirement planning, asset management, spas for men, etc. Yes, while our readers love such insightful articles, they were on a high priority list of content when we knew that there were excellent advertisers available.

A word of advice to advertisers: those advertisers that have embraced contextual advertising are creating a lot of brand awareness (literally for free) because publishers are motivated to create content on their area of business and even mention company/product names. So stop complaining that there are no articles when you have not even started to advertise. If you advertise, publishers will be happy to create content.

Recommended link: How to develop content?

Dump affiliate programs now

We have been arguing all along that affiliate programs are one-sided and do not create as much value for a publisher as they do for the merchant. Over a 10-month period, through an aggressive program of working with a range of affiliate programs on our eCreativa network of websites, we have concluded that publishers would be much better off either dumping affiliate programs altogether or minimizing their role in their business (and embrace PPC advertising instead). We have published our findings in the following two articles as well as in the eBusiness blog:

Building a business with affiliate programs

Business model transformation (from affiliate programs to PPC)

While we had suspected it all along, the current strategy in the merchant community with regards to affiliate programs is to use it solely as a vehicle for generating quality traffic and getting a higher PageRank. If they do get some orders, well that is great and they will split the profits with the affiliate but there is no other way to get so much for nothing.

This strategy is very well summed up on the Entrepreneur magazine's website in an article about top ten tips for increasing traffic without spending a penny. Guess what the #1 tip is - Build an army of affiliates to drive traffic to your site for you. Corey Rudl continues, "You can literally get your affiliates to do all your marketing for you. In fact, one of my most successful clients doesn't spend any time optimizing his site for the free search engines—he lets his affiliates do it for him. Many of them go to great lengths to make sure their sites are highly ranked, and because they all link to his site, they boost his search engine ranking as well.
The best thing about affiliate programs is that you don't pay your affiliates a dime for all the work they do unless they help you make a sale."

Recommendations to nano-publishers

1. Get out of affiliate programs as fast as you can or at least minimize their share in your portfolio. In our experience you will see remarkable growth in revenue.
2. Some affiliate programs allow you to put affiliate links so that visitors do not leave your website. Use this feature.
3. If you want to stick to an affiliate program, find those where the payout is high. We are currently recommending only those programs that payout at least $50. Trust us - you won't get rich with Amazon or LinkShare or Commission Junction but you may with AdSense.

Recommended article: Make money, like we do, with content

Affiliate program success secrets

As many of you who have been reading our ebusiness blog know that we have concluded that a pay-per-click (PPC) program generates far more revenue than affiliate programs for most nano-publishing companies. We believe that affiliate programs benefit the merchant a lot more than the publisher. On the other hand, a PPC program is more of a win-win situation for all parties involved.

That does nto mean, however, that we have given up on affiliate programs altogether. We still are affiliates of over a dozen merchants through LinkShare, Commission Junction, Amazon.com, and ClickBank. The following are some of the secrets of our success with affiliate programs (mind you, the affiliate programs generate a very small percentage of our revenue at this time but we want to get whatever we can out of them):

• Use affiliate programs when AdSense does not seem to have any ads (you can generally get a good idea by doing a Google search and see if any ads show on the right sidebar.). For instance, if nothing pops up you can always find a few related books on Amazon. By doing this you are not wasting your real estate on the Internet.
• Use the alternate URL feature of Google Adsense to display affiliate program ads. That way you do not not show public service ads. (Related link: How to substitute public service ads?)
• Clearly label the affiliate program links as advertisements (or whatever term you want to use to distinguish them from links to other pages on your websites). If possible, indicate the cost of the product and anything else that will help the visitor decide if s/he is interested in the product and can afford it. The more information you give, the more chances are that you will not end up losing a visitor who does not do what you want her/him to do (since this is how you get paid). However, by giving this information right in the body of the ad, you are making sure that if the reader is not interested, s/he will stay on your website and visit other pages and hopefully click on other ads. Below is a sample of how we are now putting affiliate program links:

Recommended link: Building a real business with affiliate programs

Merchant account; how to pick one

At some point your business will need a merchant account though our experience has shown that you may not need a merchant account:

1. If your sales are still small
2. You do not like the hassle of having a merchant account
3. You do not mind paying slightly higher commission

We started off with Paypal and it worked fine for us. In fact, many of our customers liked Paypal since it allowed them to pay either with a credit card or a bank account. Many customers outside the United States could only pay us through a Paypal account since their credit cards did not work for overseas transactions. We are so pleased with Paypal that we continue to have an account that we use to collect payments for goods that we sell, mostly e-books, some personal care products, and exercise yoga videos. We don't have to deal with a lot of the hassles of providing secure online shopping and making sure that no one hacks into our servers and steals valuable information.

Why having a merchant account is good?

1. You pay lower commissions/charges for each transaction. If you have large business, these charges can quickly add up. How large is large? Well, you will need to do the math for your situation. Do some research and see paying what amount is acceptable for you as commissions and then pick the best option.
2. It looks more professional. While Paypal is very well regarded and is used by almost everyone on eBay, a Paypal account still gives the impression of your business being small. On the other hand, when you have your own customized shopping cart and visitors are shopping on your website, it is good for your brand image.
3. You have more control over transactions. You can refund more easily and charge extra if the customer decides to add more goods later (without asking the customer to go back to the website).
4. You can accept orders through mail and over the phone when customers provide you with their credit card number and other supporting information.

How to pick a merchant account provider?

• Study the fee structure carefully. Do the math to see what is the level of business you have and how much you will end up paying. Yahoo Small Business Merchant Solutions seems to have a very reasonable program if you are a small business.
• Ask about their customer service and make a phone call to assess the level of service. If they do not have 24/7 service, you might want to think again. Your ebusiness should be live 24/7 and if you have any problems you should be able to pick up the phone and get instant service. We believe that 24x7 service is worth the extra expense.
• Ask for the level that makes sense for your business and confirm if you can upgrade as you build your business later. There is no need to sign up for premium programs (even if they offer a bigger discount) if that is what you don't need.

Blogging is not just about linking

As we have been suggesting in our previous article, blogs can be extremely profitable ventures (primarily through advertising, endorsements, mentions, etc.) provided you write the blogs the right way. Here are some important points to remember if you want to leverage blogging as a revenue-generating activity:

• If you read a couple of blogs at random (and some of them are fairly popular because they were the first ones to be launched), most of them essentially keep linking to other blogs/websites with a casual comment added (though not even that). So all these bloggers do is keep reading stuff on other websites and then just put a link. Well, you have created some value for your readers by doing the hard work of finding something interesting, but the next thing that a visitor does is to click on the link and leave your blog. So if you complain that your advertising revenue is closer to zero then it is your fault.
• Blogs are still evolving and our analysis shows that they could become essentially substitutes for some website content (not all though). In the beginning, blogs were initially online diaries (and teenagers grabbed on to them and used blogs to basically gossiping online) but that is no longer the case. While some well-written blogs are still somewhat personal, business blogs tend to be a compilation of well-written articles. Links may be added when they are valuable and relevant but these blogs do not rely on links - they create their own content. And that is the value. If you tell your readers something that they don't know and only you know, you have created value.
• Another recommendation that we have is not to mix personal posts/articles with the overall focus of your website. So for example, you want to run a successful blog on fishing. Well, then stay focused on fishing and related topics. If you go to the mall and look at some fishing gear, then it is OK to write about it but if you ate a hamburger and met some friends there is no need to mention that in your "fishing" blog. For such personal stuff or to talk about "anything" it is best to have a "personal" blog. Blog directories are emerging and they tend to characterize blogs by topics as the website directories do.

Recommended blog to see how a blog should be run as a business

ebusiness companies need AdSense and AdWords

As Google's AdSense/AdWords program continues to succeed (producing record profits for Google as well as publishers and advertisers), there is a new trend emerging. Many publications simply do not bother with keywords or products for which there are no advertisers. From time to time, we do write articles in our network of websites (MYNIPPON, Lindisima, LuvCube, iProceed, and eCreativa) that will benefit our readership but it is generally a lower priority. As a business, it is important that we allocate resources only to value-creating activities.

Why every ebusiness company needs AdSense/AdWords?

When you are an advertiser on Google, particularly if you rely on recommendations and mentions by publishers (which by the way is a great way to get free publicity), you are accessing a large pool of publishers.

While conducting research prior to writing an article we rely heavily on search results through a simple Google search. Of course, we also take a look at the advertisers in the sidebar. We visit a couple of websites (both from the organic results as well as those of advertisers), pick a few that we like, and then mention it in our article. If a company does not show up in the first or second page of search results and is neither an advertiser in AdSense/AdWords we don't bother.

Finally, advertising through AdSense/AdWords allows you to tap into the search market.

How to increase page views?

First of all, here a few reasons why you should worry about page views and why more is better particularly if you are interested in leveraging content to drive ebusiness:

• More page views means visitors spend more time on your website. It means that they like what you have. Thus, they are more likely to come back, tell others about you, and also trust you more. All the indicators that they are likely to perform a positive action (a sale, a signup or a click on an advertisement)
• While there are several metrics used to measure the popularity of a website, page views is one of them. While many websites (e.g. Yahoo) can claim to have a large number of page views because every time a visitor goes to the website they check their emails or weather or read the news. All of these count as multiple page views and such portal type websites typically tend to have 10-15 page views per visitor. If you run a website like MYNIPPON, however, then none of these things happen. That is why, even a page view metric of 3 is a good number.
• While the good old days of impression based advertising are almost over and whatever little is left is likely to disappear soon (except for maybe some very large websites), when you have more page views you can present more ads to each visitors increasing the prospects of a desirable action from the visitor.

How to increase page views?

We will share here the learnings we have had from Lindisima which has a page view metric of 11 and from our recent experience of doubling the page view of MYNIPPON from 1.5 to 3.0.

1. Insert one or two highly relevant links. We suggest one link in the body of the article (so that if the reader does not like the article, she or he can click on the link rather than hit the 'back' button) and one at the end (if the reader loves your article and likes the website and is open to read more on your website).
2. Create a "What's new" banner at the bottom. That way you can highlight your new articles. A characteristic of human beings is that they like "new" stuff. You can also automate this process by using simple javascript. If you want to see how this bar looks, take a look at this page. If you want to use the content syndication technique that we use, you are welcome to copy the code from our website.
3. Split long articles into sections. What really bores and scares visitors is a really long article without headings and breaks. However, if you break the article into several pages and provide a good navigation, visitors are likely to visit other pages.

Design website for readers not robots

You must have heard this refrain from all technical experts and companies that run search engines, particularly Google. However, you continue to come across crooks who will try to cheat the system. It is easy to find the cheats. One simple example is to do a search on the term MYNIPPON and see how many crooks pop up - people who want to steal our traffic.

Our advice to you if you want to build a solid nano-publishing business: Don't do anything unethical and devious. You will not go anywhere and may even be penalized by search engines, or even worse, blacklisted. And if you have hired a search engine optimization firm to give you all kinds of unbelievable rankings, be very careful and watch carefully what they do. It is one thing to make your website spider-friendly; it is totally another thing to promise a ranking in first one or two pages in search results. Anyone who promises that to you is definitely going to use unethical techniques.

The reason we say this is that in our portfolio of websites (MYNIPPON, Lindisima, iProceed, LuvCube, and eCreativa) we simply write great content and literally don't care about search engines. We use simple techniques (page title, descriptions, and a few keywords) to make each of our pages friendly to spiders and that's it. The search engines do the rest. The result shows that our strategy works: In the month of September we attracted over half-a-million visitors.

Recommended article: How to honestly achieve high PageRank?

Target market for ebusiness

One of the issues that all businesses have to deal with is the geography. Being an ebusinesses allows you to literally serve the whole world as long as you ship the product (which may not even be necessary if you sell a digital product) and receive payment. Unfortunately, it is not always so easy to go beyond the borders.

One issue that we have struggled with over the years is how much business we want from non-US users. Since over 90% of our revenues are derived from advertising and digital products, we can serve customers almost anywhere but there are downsides to targeting visitors from countries other than those in US, Canada, European Union, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia. The advertising rates for the rest of the world are incredibly low. We have seen this in particular with our website Lindisima which gets a lot of its traffic from Latin America. Finally, we realized that we had to target the English-speaking Latinas in the United States and Canada and we launched the English version of Lindisima.

Something similar has happened to MYNIPPON. Due to the website being in English it attracts a lot of visitors from Asia. While we do not want to ignore our Asian base, we continue to try to build a readership base in US and Western Europe to get the best advertising rates. Generally, it is easy to do so simply by changing the focus of your content.

Our other two websites, iProceed and LuvCube, are truly America-centric.

Having said that, it is important to note that the growth potential in America is limited. The number of Internet users in the US is ~ 190 million and is not expected to grow very fast. China will soon surpass this number and it is not going to be easy for most American companies to serve the Chinese unless they partner with Chinese websites or invest heavily into their website design team.

Another attractive market is India with just about 100 million Internet users and growing rapidly. The good news is that Indian Internet users generally have a good command of English and actually are not always looking for "Indian" information. They are fascinated by America and will be happy to surf "American" websites. But to truly appeal to them, you will still need to "Indianize" your website.

Final note: 75% of Internet users worldwide are outside the US. So think how you will target them, profitably.

Recommended article: Growth opportunities in China

Microsoft FrontPage Review for website publication

As we have been saying all along, you may need both a blog and website to fully exploit your content while operating a nano-publishing business. Since we started in 1999 with zero web design experience and HTML knowledge, we embraced Microsoft FrontPage (can be bought separately or combined with Microsoft Office System). Believe it or not, we still do not code in HTML though we know the basics to make minor changes in the code when we need to.

Advantages of Microsoft FrontPage

1. Almost any one who knows the basics of using a personal computer can actually design a website.
2. The manual is pretty good and we encourage you to religiously follow the manual as you try to learn the program. It will make your life easy in the long run.
3. It is also easy to add functionalities on your website and make it search-engine friendly by adding keywords, description, and title by using a popup window.

Disadvantages

1. You still will need to learn a few technical things to publish the website to your server since depending on what hosting service you pick the commands may be slightly different. (Related article: How to choose a web hosting service?)
2. While most web hosting companies will install FrontPage server extensions for you, these extensions always seem to give a hard time. They get corrupted and often have to be reinstalled - altogether a frustrating experience.
3. While publishing the website, you might also get some ridiculous error messages that seem like gibberish to sane people like us. Often times, just rebooting the computer does the trick.
4. While we initially heard through the grapevine that FrontPage did not support very large websites but mynippon.net has almost 1,000 pages and everything works fine.
5. FrontPage also seems to generate a lot of HTML code which many techies think is not needed. Apparently too much code slows down the loading of the page.

Recommendation: If you are a total novice to web design (like us) and do not want to learn HTML (like us) but want to have a program that works seamless with your Windows operating system and with other Microsoft programs, then FrontPage is a good choice.

How to register domain names

Many readers have written to us asking us about our recommendations on how to register a domain name. Despite the fact that a blog on Blogger.com or any other large hosting company will be less of a hassle and probably get indexed faster, we still strongly recommend that you get on your own domain name for branding purposes. Plus, when you have your own domain name and website hosting company, you are in possession of all your files (and intellectual property). (Recommended article: How to choose a web hosting service)

How to register a domain name?

1. First thing to do is, of course, to pick a name. If you already have one or several names in mind, you can simply go to one of the registrars and check availability. We have registered our domain names with Register but there are many other good ones like Hostway, GoDaddy, UpDaddy, Network Solutions, Yahoo, etc.
2. If your domain is available, then simply go ahead and register it right away.
3. The question is should you register your domain through your website hosting company. In many cases, it is a good idea because you will then be dealing with just one company and have to do one transaction. On the other hand, you might get stuck with one company in case you are not happy with their hosting services.
4. The other issue is if you should register other options, e.g., .org, .net, etc. of the name that you have chosen. While technically it is a good idea, particularly if you are trying to build a brand, but very soon it can become quite an expense. You can always wait as you build your business. It used to be that squatters will register your domain name and then try to extort money out of you. Now that the courts favor the one who is the first one to publish a website and no one is willing to pay exorbitant sums for domain names, you have less of a worry on this account.

Recommended article: The ultimate guide to blogging

ebusiness retailers: holiday sales tips

October is a critical month for retailers, particularly those that rely on ebusiness alone. Since buying gifts online is so much better, most ebusiness retailers generate a major portion of their sales during the last quarter of the year. This article offers some tips for ebusiness retailers to increase their sales by getting some free advertising:

1. If you have not yet realized the power of bloggers on the Internet, you are probably living under a stone. So do some research on the surge in blogs and the influence that bloggers have on consumer trends.
2. Do a search for your product/service along with the word "blog" and then pick those blogs that talk about you. Find out what are they saying. Develop a list of all the bloggers that are talking about you and contact them. They have more power than you think.
3. Approach the bloggers and provide them with more information about your holiday sales plan. Ship samples of your products to them or let them try your services. If they like it (or dislike it) and decide to blog about it, you will get tremendous media coverage. Don't be discouraged if some bloggers write something negative. That is all part of the game. A blogger could still write negative things about you even if you did not ship them your products.

Recommended link: How to use blogs to refine your advertising strategy?

Achieving high pagerank tricks

Sometime on October 6/7, 2004, a major Google update happened, or at least that is what the news is. We had, however, started to see some changes a couple of days ahead on all of our websites. The good news is that we have come out to be in pretty good shape in this update.

Lindisima.com Latinas on the Internet: Maintained its overall rank at 5 and was able to get new ranks on recently added pages. Lindisima blog climbed to 4. Traffic on this website is exploding and for the month of September 2004, we had an average of 10,000 visitors a day. Wow!

MYNIPPON Love & life, guilt free: Maintained its overall rank at 5 and was able to get new ranks on recently added pages, particularly on our Guilt-free lifestyle channel that we are very excited about. We were hoping that our Find a man (after 30) channel will also get some rank but probably we were too close to the update. The MYNIPPON blog climbed to 5 while this ebusiness blog achieved a pagerank of 3 in a matter of weeks. Not bad; we are very satisfied.

LuvCube Find, live & enjoy love, a website that was launched in June 2004 achieved a pagerank of 4 while the LuvCube blog reached 5. We are very excited.

We achieved similar results on iProceed Shortest path to strategic growth which has a overall pagerank of 3 but several pages are actually 4 and 5. We are wondering if we should change the main page more often. Like other blogs in our network the iProceed blog also achieved a pagerank of 5.

Similarly no change was expected in our corporate website eCreativa network of interactive online media. Mostly 4 and 5.

So how did we manage to have such high pagerank?

1. We don't design our website to achieve a certain pagerank. We design it for you. Google takes care of the rest.
2. Don't go crazy getting links. If you have good stuff, people will put links for you without asking. We do the same.
3. Keep it simple (like Google). When you make it fancy, you get into trouble. Give a reasonable title, add the right keywords, provide a short description and then just write an article on the subject that you have picked and make sure that it is useful to someone.

Conclusion: You don't have to pay a million bucks to a search engine optimization (SEO) firm to cheat the system. Just do it the right way and it is free to do that.

Recommended article: How to increase the ranking of your website?

Bilingual websites are powerful

It is important in business not to make assumptions that you are not willing to change over time. Our sister website, Lindisima.com, was launched in 1999/2000 with a very narrow focus: Spanish-speaking women committed to having a better life through focus on health, fitness, beauty, wellness, and spirituality. And as they say the rest is history. As many of you know, the Spanish version of Lindisima.com attracts over 10,000 visitors a day, from many countries, particularly Mexico, United States, Spain, and other countries in Latin America.

What we did not think about was the English speaking Latina - a woman who is proud of her roots but prefers English. So we listened to her voice, which was presented to us mainly through the word-of-mouth from our Spanish readers, who were telling us that they wanted their friends to visit Lindisima.com but could not recommend because it was only in English. They wanted a bilingual website.

We are pleased to announce the launch of the English version of Lindisima.com, the most successful website in the eCreativa network of websites. It is now a bilingual website but do not for a second assume that the English version is a translated version of the Spanish version. Of course, the underlying research for some articles is common but as we have always emphasizing on our strategy website, each website needs to have its own identity. So please check out Lindisima.com: Latinas on the Internet

Partnership for blog popularity

Help Make Blogs More Visible!

NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List below.

There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few "A-List" blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don't get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don't have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let's help the smaller blogs get more visibility!

This posting is GoMeme 4.0. It is part of an experiment to see if we can create a blog posting that helps 1000's of blogs get higher rankings in Google. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0, spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog.

Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility in Google and other search engines. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add your URL to the end of the Path List below. As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL. Later, when your blog is indexed by search engines, they will see the links pointing to your blog from all the downstream blogs that got this via you, which will cause them to rank your blog higher in search results. Everyone in the Path List below benefits in a similar way as this meme spreads. Try it!

Instructions: Just copy this entire post and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on!

Path List

1. Minding the Planet
2. Wireless LAN
3. Writing Resources
4. BillBoard
5. Stock Quotes Stock Trading Stock Help
6. Christmas All Year
7. Quotes from Famous People
8. Recipes at World Famous Recipes
9. Jobs and Employment
10. Quotes
11. Jokes and Humor
12. 480 Area Code Guide
13. Phoenix Arizona East Valley Community Index
14. HTTP in Phoenix AZ
15. Daily Bible Verse
16. Love Poems
18. World Famous Recipes
19. Recipes Recipe
20. Members Space
21. Search Engines - World Search News
22. Home Improvement and Home Remodeling Ideas and Tips
23. Famous Quotes And Famous Sayings Network Weblog
24. Life Story Writing
25. Links Page Link Exchange Manager Site
26. Random Ramblings and Links
27. Personal Finance and Financial Planning
28. ebusiness blog: content management drives sales
29. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy this line and move it down to the next line for the next person).

NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.

Is PageRank important?

If you are in any way involved with ebusiness or nanopublishing, one of the things that might be making you lose sleep is PageRank (trademark; applicable to all further mention of PageRank in this article). If not, good for you. You are doing the right thing and there is nothing for you to do but just go enjoy your life. Those of you who may be losing sleep, please read about our experience with PageRank.

What is PageRank?
As Google describes it, it is the heart of their search technology. It is based on the simple principle that if a page has more links to it, it is more popular and hence should have a higher PageRank. Or in other words, it will show up higher in search results. But as most people know, it is not perfect. In fact, PageRank is heavily biased in favor of already popular web pages by making them even more popular (since they get found more often, they get linked more often). So what happens is that some websites continue to have low PageRank even if they have better content and new pages (with excellent content) may never be found in a search. That creates huge barriers to entry for new websites. So if you are an ebusiness websites where every visitor means revenue, you can be in deep trouble if your PageRank is low.

Let us take a look at the bizarre results due to the underlying logic of PageRank, based on our experience. Our largest website is Lindisima, which has been around since 2000 and as of August 2004, attracted an average of 10,000 visitors a day and has approximately 1,000 pages of content. As you can guess, this is a reasonably popular website overall and one of the most popular among Spanish-speaking women. PageRank of Lindisima: 5

Now let us talk about eCreativa. eCreativa is the name of the company that owns Lindisima and and other websites including MYNIPPON, LuvCube, and iProceed. We have always used eCreativa website as an administrative website. We rarely updated it in the past but it has been around since 2000. It has about 30 pages of content overall and generally attracts less than 50 visitors a day (as of August 2004). PageRank of eCreativa: 5

Should you worry about PageRank?
Only a little bit, on a very high level. It is not something to go nuts over or to watch the PageRank on a daily or even monthly basis, as some do.

So what should you worry about?
Your visitors. Create good content and good products. That is what works for nanopublishing and ebusiness websites. To bring potential "customers" to your websites, do whatever it takes, but here is another helpful article on marketing your website.