Social networking is a very effective way to build relationships. You can start a Myspace-like social networking site that caters to just about any interest. If you don’t have the time and technical expertise to start one from scratch, you can set up one easily at www.ning.com. Ning has tons of powerful social networking features and templates that you can customize to give your network a unique look and feel. By letting Ning take care of the technical aspects of your network, you can spend all your time on marketing and content development. You can see a Ning network in action at my anime community site (unfortunately, I have had much time to interact with other members on the network since I have 60 more sites to run).

One way to use your time wisely is to keep an eye out on where visitors to your site are coming from. Knowing where your hits are coming from lets you channel your marketing resources to the most cost-effective advertising channels.

When you start out a new site, you’d probably want to try out a lot of different ways to market your site, including web directory submission, article writing, pay-per-click, social bookmarking, etc. Monitoring your website stats lets you know which of these methods is most effective and allows to focus your time and money those methods.

You can view your stats by logging into your hosting account. I like Awstats because it produces really neat charts and tables. If your hosting provider does not provide statistics for your site, you may use a third party service like Sitemeter.

Screenshot from cpanel:

There are currently over a hundred million websites on the internet competing for the eyeballs of visitors. How do you make your site stand out above the rest? The SEO and internet marketing gurus will repeat the old “content is king” mantra and will tell you to come up with something unique and original.

Fair enough. But how exactly does one go about doing this? What exactly is unique, original content? With the billions of pages on the net I think you’d be hard-pressed to to come up with something that is truly new and original that hasn’t been published or presented in some way by someone else already.

One way to make your content unique is add a personal touch to it. There are 5 billion people on the planet, and everyone is unique. What better way to render a site unique than to lend it a unique character that mirrors one’s own personality? The way we write, how we organize content, the words we choose, and even color scheme speaks to a site’s personality and imparts some degree of uniqueness and originality to it.

In real life a person can stand out by possessing one or more exceptional qualities, such as charisma, intelligence, creativity, trustworthiness, or whatever. These qualities can be played out through a site’s design and content to give it a certain personality.

When it comes to doing business online, people tend to be leery of whom they’re dealing with. The anonymity of the web does not mean it is easier to mislead and deceive people. Rather, it means that we must work harder to build trust and loyalty online. If you feel good about the products or services and are prepared to provide them in good faith, why not design your site in a way that exudes your confidence?

The personality of a site can attract visitors as well as build loyalty in the site. While the internet may seem like a faceless, nameless medium, but it’s the living, breathing people behind the websites that make things happen. As in real life, success in cyberspace hinges on one’s ability to forge positive personal relationships online. As a frequent shopper of online goods and services, I feel more comfortable dealing with an online company when I feel that I know the people behind it. So, it’s really not the websites themselves, but the people behind them, that influence my purchasing decisions.

Online classifieds are a powerful marketing tool often overlooked by webmasters. Classified sites like www.craigslist.org and www.backpage.com receive enormous traffic from people looking to buy and sell various products and services.

Our toolbar lists about a dozen of the most popular online classified sites on the web. Just click on the “Resources” component and go to “Classifieds”.

Placing an ad is not as difficult as you might think. In fact, much of Craigslist’s popularity is owed to the site’s fast, no-nonsense design and the ease of ad placement, not to mention that it ranks #47 in traffic of the 100 million sites on the web (according to Alexa, at least).

Please download and install our SEOPal Toolbar if you haven’t done so already.