To make money online and offline, being able to market effectively
is vital for success. Business owners often do not understand the
exact meaning of marketing, and one of the most common
misconceptions is confusing advertising for marketing. Listed
below are the differences between marketing and advertising.

To begin to explain the difference, we need to begin with the fact
that marketing is much larger and broader than advertising. In
fact,  advertising is a part of marketing. But there is much, much
more to marketing than advertising.

Obviously advertising is paying to get what you're selling in
front of other people. There are many different ways to
advertise.

Online there are both ways to advertise and ways that cost
money to advertise. Some of the free ways to advertise include
writing articles, writing blogs, and creating videos on YouTube.

Marketing includes everything you do and everything that's a
part of your business. So every email you send is part of your
marketing campaign.

Every forum post you make. Every Website you own, all the
content you put on the Web, and anything else you do that's
related to your business is part of your marketing. This is
especially true of the way you treat your customers. You
customer service is a huge part of your marketing.

Always remember this. Everything you do is marketing your
business. You are either helping your business or hurting your
business. So make sure that everything you do is helping you
make your business better.

When small business people mistakenly think that marketing
and advertising is the same thing, the result is a substantial
amount of marketing being ignored. Then the business suffers
because there are entire segments of marketing that aren't
being addressed.

Always remember that everything you do that's even remotely
related  to your business is part of the way other people see
you and your business. Therefore it's all part of your marketing
and should be treated as such.

In Internet Marketing one of the keys to success is having a list.
That is a list of people who you send regular emails to and
market your products and services or products and services of
other website owners... as an affiliate.

The trick is building a list to begin with. Here are three simple
steps for getting people to join your list.


Create a Free Product

The first step to getting people to join your list is to create your
own product, or have one made for you, and then offer it to
other people online and/or offline.

This product can be just about anything but it has to have value
and it also has to be related to the niche your building your
list in.

The product doesn't have to be overly long or give away too much
information but it does have to provide value to the person who
signs up on your list. If not, then they won't stay on your list very
long and they will think of you as someone who can't do much
for them.


Make the Offer Exclusive

Once you have your product then you need to start marketing it.
When you market it the product you want to make sure that you
stress that it's free and that it's only available to people who
sign-up on your list. The free part will make people interested
(everyone loves free stuff) and the part about only getting it for
joining your list will obviously make people sign-up for your list.


Drive Traffic to Your Site

The last part of these 3 easy steps for getting people to join
your list is to drive traffic to your site. There are many different
ways to do this. There are many free ways to drive the traffic
and there are ways to pay to get traffic to your site.

Some of the free ways include writing articles, setting up social
networking pages, and blogging. You can also participate in
forums that are related to your site and put the URL of the site
in your signature line.

If you decide to write articles then you should submit the articles
to places like ezinearticles.com and place your site's URL in your
signature box.

The main way to pay to get traffic is to advertise with Google's
AdWords. You can pay to run an advertisement whenever a
certain keyword phrase is searched for. While this can bring in
a lot of very targeted traffic, if you don't know what you're doing
then you can lose a lot of money. Save using PPC for when you
learn more on it.

In the meantime, you may want to take advantage of other forms
of paid advertising, like online classified sites, solo and sponsored
ads in ezines, banner advertising, just to name a few.

List building is truly the first step one should implement before
doing any kind of marketing online. You'll want to go where the
people are, (the people in your niche) grab their interest, then
follow up with great offers... Plus give added value as well, and
do so on a regular basis. You'll then be on your way to becoming
an online marketing success!

Recently a partner of mine had 3 of his content websites delisted from Google search results and he asked for my advice. As a result, I did an extensive study into the possible scenarios where Google will delist a website from its search.

Instead of keeping my findings in my memory, I think it's better to pen them down in this article so that you and I can refer to it in the future.

Here are some of the proven reasons why a website is delisted from Google:

1) Repeated spelling and syntactical errors
It has been confirmed by Google spokesman that a website can be delisted from its search engine due to repeated spelling and syntactical errors.

Here's what Google spokesman, Artie Su, said "When our systems syntactically analyze the words on a page, it's very easy to determine whether correct grammar is being followed. When it isn't, particularly if the errors are consistently repeated over a period of time, the site gets downgraded. That's because most spammers and creators of junk commercial sites don't do any kind of quality control. Grammar check is an easy way to spot them."

If your website repeatedly contains a particular misspelled word, or it's primarily made up of junk content (such as those computer generated content), you are at a high risk of being delisted from Google search.


2) Adding a large number of external links in a short time
If you, for whatever reason, add a lot of external links to your website, you can be delisted from Google search.

One possible scenario is where your server is hacked and spammers add lots of links to your website without you knowing. Most of these links are hidden. You won't see them unless you study the source code.

Another possible scenario is when you are too active in link exchange. Let's take link directories for example, most link directories will have an option for you to link back to them. If you spend one whole day exchanging links with 200 link directories, your website is at risk. (Note that I'm talking about external links from your website to other websites, not incoming links from other websites to your website.)


3) Sitemap error
This is a rare problem but it can happen. Your server may block Google bot from crawling your site. If you realize that all your websites in the same server are delisted from Google, this may be the reason. To solve the problem, you'll have to inform your server about it.

This is a technical problem. If you want for info, it's better to read this article: http://beecherbowers.com/2009/02/03/google-sitemap-timeout-errors/


4) Hidden links
Hidden links can get your website delisted from Google.
A typical trick to hide your links by making the color of your link same color as the background, so that your visitor cannot see them but the search bot can. Another common trick is by putting the links in an invisible tag.



5) Doorway pages
The idea of a doorway page is to present one version of the page to the search engines while showing another version to the visitors. This is against Google's principle, which is "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users."


I've just started to explore the issue of being delisted from Google. In the next few weeks (or even months), I'll be doing several things to see if I can get the 3 websites listed in Google search again. As usual, I'll keep you updated on any interesting discoveries.

Last but not least, I'll end this article with 2 useful links from Google:
What to do if your site isn't doing well in search
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34444
How to ask Google to reconsider your site
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843

 


You can access this article and subscribe to Ken's blog at:

http://www.leadsleap.com/blog/delisted-from-google-why/?r=kward