Web Merchant Resource Center

Starting August 12 there’s a fairly new beta directory, AffSphere, that is going to be sharing their affiliate income with Contributing Authors.  This is the first syndication directory actually offering to share revenue their Contributing Authors!

This is an excellent Search Engine Marketing opportunity for all merchants motivated to write unique content to attract new customers. Simply write up a short article with your own unique content, submit it to AffSphere.com, and generate exposure for your business, traffic, AND eight possible ways to automattically produce residual income.

To learn more, start at AffSphere.com

For businesses that are truly local in focus, targetting local search ranking factors is a very effective SEO strategy if for no other reason than it enables you to weed out your global competitors and focus more on ranking tops for your locality.

For example, if you are a landscaper in Portland Oregon, why spend your SEO efforts and budgets to compete with other “Landscapers” – especially since that must always be a locally provided service — when you would be found by many more customers searching for landscapers in Porland Oregon.

Thanks to John Alexander for bringing to our attention a recent study by Mary Bowling of Blizzard Internet Marketing compiling the responses of 20 experts active in the Local Search Marketing on 47 criteria with respect to their influence on ranking factors in the Google and Yahoo Local “Universal” search algorithms.

See the results of this study here:
http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

On May 12, 2008 Google announced a preview release of a new free service, Friend Connect, that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.

Google Friend Connect gives site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their websites — Without requiring coding experience!
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Frankly, there are so many communities out there and so few of them are worth any mention let alone subscribing to  . . . and then there are those very few that are actually interesting.

The latest community that we have been excited about is the Website Development Community provided by the v7network.

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It’s official. WMS has relaunched its ExpressLane shopping cart as a free, downloadable shopping cart.

ExpressLane was developed to fit a particular niche of merchants who are small and need something more complex than our Quick Checkout Form, something more professional than PayPal, yet something less robust and expenssive than our “top shelf” shopping carts.

We have also found that merchants in this niche

• need a very simple, entry-level solution just as easy to integrate as PayPal “Buy Now” buttons on their site
• have websites already developed and don’t wan’t to have to “squeeze” their designs into a shopping cart template.
• need a shopping cart solution that can be easily custmized to their secific needs.

Read more about this FREE shopping cart here:

ExpressLane — the FREE ASP Shopping Cart

What may have worked a few years ago could be outdated today, so it’s important to constantly improve your Web site. However, a massive overhaul is just too much work to undertake at one time.

read more | digg story

At Website Guru the latest contest is going to award $20,000.00 to the most creative SEO contestants. You don’t have to be a genius to win, but need to be fun enough to make an impact!

read more | digg story

This article assumes that you have decided to start blogging for business and that you have decided to host your blog rather than use a hosted blog service
( see earlier articles if these two topics are new to you:
Increase Exposure for Your Business: Start a Blog
How to set up your blog for your business )

Once you have decided that blogging for business is an appropriate approach for your business, and you have decided that hosting your own blog is what you want . . . the next consideration to take into account is what URI to use for your blog.

That is, will your blog be hosted via a subdirectory on a hosting account and domain name you currently have hosted; or will it be hosted on a subdomain related to the domain you currently have hosted; or will it be hosted on a completely different domain name . . . . and maybe even on a completely different server and/or host provider?

Your eyes might already be rolling . . . . Admittedly, this is rather technical information to make your decision upon.

So let’s start with the differences between these variations in general first, and then apply this understanding to what to do with your blog.

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Ok, so you have decided that starting a blog would be an avenue for you to increase exposure to your business online and that you have the commitment it would take to start and maintain a blog . . . .

So, “how do I get started”, you ask.

Excellent question, and there are some important considerations to take into account before you do.

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Seems hardly a day goes by when some application or other doesn’t need to be upgraded these days.

We had been working on issues getting the WordPress plug-in, Subscribe2, to work on our blog for several weeks to no avail . . . and were waiting for their imminent release of version 4.5 hoping that would solve our problems. It didn’t; infact, we pretty much crashed our backend by upgrading to it.

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