The way that you manage expectations can have a lasting effect on how productive you are.  Managing expectations does not end internally, but you have to do a good job managing your expectations for outside vendors.  Not every company can handle all of the aspects of running a business in house.  Sometimes you have to venture to outside vendors for help.  A large swing for companies running an online business or even a presence is the use of an interactive marketing agency.

Interactive Marketing Agencies are a little different than what people think they are.  They do not only handle your advertising online, but they also help with tasks such as brand strategies, overall marketing strategies, PPC management, content management, conversion optimization, social media, and pretty much any task that relates to running a successful business online.  Agencies can be a breath of fresh air to an online business, but you have to manage your expectations for the agency.

Agencies of any size and type are not miracle workers.  They can only provide services to companies that have realistic goals.  While they can provide great services to revamp your whole business, you need to know where you want to take your company.  You need to have an established goal and vision for where you want the interactive marketing agency to take you.  If you contact an agency without having these goals in place, then you could be disappointed in what the agency accomplishes.

Agencies are usually really good at communicating what they are doing, so you need to make sure that you are on top of your own goals and milestones.  I would recommend that you have the marketing agency help you create realistic milestones for your specific business and website.  This way everyone will be happy when each mark is met and you are not mad for expecting more.  Remember that managing expectations is an important aspect of running any business, so make sure you do it for your internal resources as well as any external resources.

This is a sponsored post

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I received a question from a reader this week in regards to search engine submission.  The reader asked that if they are starting a new website, would it be worth the money to use a search engine submission service.  While I haven’t heard this question in some time, I figured I would address it for anyone thinking about using such services.

My short answer to this question is no to search engine submission services.  While there is quite a bit of information on the web that would tell you that if you don’t submit your site to search engines, then you will never receive traffic.  These such statements are actually comical and tend to be created by websites that provide search engine submission.  Don’t let these companies trick you into thinking that you need them.  Search engine submission is a very old way of getting search engines to look at your site.  Webmasters do not use these services anymore because they do not work and the large search engines do not really accept submissions anymore.

If you are looking at search engine submission and you think that a service is going to submit your site to over 1,000 engines or more, then you need to leave the site immediately.  While there might be thousands of search engines out there, there are only 3 that you need to worry about.  Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the big three and are the only ones that you need to care about.  I will let you know that Yahoo is now using Bing’s results for their search engine, so you really only need to worry about Google and Bing.  There are many free search engines submission services out there, but don’t even waste your time.

The best way to get your new website into a search engine is to get links pointed to your website.  The best links that you want to get would be on websites that are relevant to your website.  There are many great link building services out there that could help your website receive quality links.  I would recommend that you join a good webmaster forum such as DigitalPoint or V7N for great services and tips for the help on your new website.  DigitalPoint is a great forum that has many different link building services out there that you can get for very little money.

So, if you have a new website that you want to get into Google and Bing, then check out some quality link building services to start the process.  Leave the search engine submission to people that love to waste money and time.  You should also join Google’s Webmaster Central and Bing’s Webmaster Toolbox.  With both of these free services, you can enter your website information, get your website verified, and then submit a sitemap of all your website pages.  This is also a great way to get your website included in the search engine’s index.  If you do not have a sitemap, you can create one for free up to 500 pages with XML Sitemaps.  Good luck to everyone that is just starting a website and congratulations on your new venture.

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SocialSpark has been a quality Get Paid to Blog platform for some time now.  It has features that other services do not and advertisers seem to enjoy the service.  While SocialSpark has not been used on this blog, I have used it before on other blogs.  The service was good, but obviously needed to be revamped.  Well, everyone welcome SocialSpark 2.0!

I got the email about this change on July 12th, so I figured I would check it out.  After I read their blog about the changes, I can honestly say that I was NOT impressed.  Most features and changes were great until I stumbled upon their Direct Publishing requirement.  This is exactly what it sounds like, where SocialSpark will use your username and password to your blog to automatically upload your post to your blog.  You actually write your post in SocialSpark and then the advertiser gets to look at it and ask for changes.  This does reduce the amount of times that you have to deal with non payments after you run your post, which was a pain for everyone.

While you do get guaranteed payments, you also give up your login credentials to SocialSpark so they can automatically post to your blog.  I am not sure about everyone, but that does not happen on my blogs without careful consideration.  We don’t even allow guest authors to have access via different logins.  It is to make sure that we have full control over the quality of the content.  I think SocialSpark made a huge mistake with this crazy requirement and with other people commenting on this, they agree with me.  This is a no-no for most bloggers.

SocialSpark…..Change this crazy requirement and make it optional for bloggers.  Do the right thing!

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Over the years, I have come across many different people in the online world.  People that are dedicated to their cause, people that just want to make a buck, and others that just learned how to use email.  I tend to not really deal with too many people that have just learned the great wonders of the internet, but still come across them.  I know that they will catch up with technology at some point.  My main concern is with the people that are just online to make a buck through blogging.

There are so many different ways to make money online that it tends to lean toward ludicrous.  A good majority of people start blogging online just to get their feet wet and then find out that they enjoy it.  These are the people that I applaud.  If you are working on a project online that you enjoy, then go for it and keep doing what you are doing.  The reason why most people fail to make a name for themselves or make any money is because they are trying to make money doing something that they do not enjoy, or know nothing about.

There are thousands of sites out there that will show you the “secrets” of making money online, but most are just sites that are making money off of you.  Will you make money with their software or idea?  Most likely not.  The main reason this is true is because you are looking at this with pure dollar signs in mind, not if you actually enjoy it.  The thought of making money is on the forefront of minds these days with the massive US recession, but doing it online is very difficult.  There is so much competition to contend with that you will quit before you make any money.  Most people that I have spoken with spend more starting up the website or blog than they ever will make.  This is just not a good business practice.

Creating blogs based off the most popular keywords or highest margin adsense topics will only result in failure in the long run.  There are millions of sites that are already established and running for the same thing you are.  Starting in this type of environment is a leading cause of failure.  If you want to succeed online, the one thing I ask you to do is stay true to what you love.  Blogging was created in order for people to voice their opinions, concerns, and views about anything that they pleased.  After a while, people found out you could make money blogging.  Then everyone tried to cash in and the industry became over saturated.

If you want to make money online with blogging, then stick with a topic that you are knowledgeable in and you actually enjoy.  If you can do this, then blogging will become fairly easy.  Remember that it can take a year to start getting good traffic to your blog and then you can start monetizing it.  Once you build a solid reader base, then you can start showing them ads for things that are relevant.  People respond better to ads if they know the site well and understand the topics that are being discussed.  Knowing the topic that you are blogging about will keep you blogging for a long time because posts will be able to be created with ease.  If you try to make a blog just to make money, you will spend more time researching, then writing.  Keep true to passions and the money will come in later.

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It is important to make sure that your website or ecommerce store has all of its SEO ducks in a row.  We talk to many visitors about their SEO efforts and usually find simple things to fix.  There are a lot of times where there are simple fixes that can improve your overall website optimization.  We have found that there are many shopping carts or websites that do not have their headings properly formatted with HTML.

Sample H1 Heading

While there are many ways to format headings, it is important for SEO purposes to use the designated heading tags.  The easiest way to format headings is to use your CSS file to differentiate the colors and font size among other things.  Webmasters and designers should remember that you can format your heading tags in your css file as well and it would be the best way to handle any headings.  Heading tags range from H1 to H6 and the size of the heading usually gets smaller as the number gets bigger.  H1 is the biggest heading and H6 is the smallest.

H1 Heading

H2 Heading

H3 Heading

H4 Heading

H5 Heading

H6 Heading

Search Engines understand the H tags and give them the proper weight in their algorithm.   Every webpage on your website or your ecommerce store should have an H1 tag to designate the most important information.  Make sure your ecommerce shopping cart product pages use the H1 tag properly.  Most should have the title of the product formatted with the H1 tag.  This will tell search engines that the title of your product is of the most importance on the page.  You can have other important aspects use different heading tags, but make sure you do not have multiple tags of the same weight.  You do not want more than one of each as that makes it look confusing and search engine spiders might not like it.

To create your heading tags, all you need to do is create format within your CSS file and then call it in your html files.   If you are using an ecommerce shopping cart, make sure that your provider has used the heading tags in a proper manner or even at all.  There have been many providers that just format the headings in the css file, but they are not the proper heading tags that search engines love.  This is such a simple fix that every website and ecommerce store should be implementing it.  Change the look and feel of each heading tag to suit your needs and to match your overall website design.  Headings are important, so make sure they you format them properly with the correct tags.

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This is a guest post by Kevin Ryan. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Blogging is a great way to open up the world to your opinion.  Your blog is your voice with a blank slate to relay your thoughts and ideas.  Blogging can be fun, but it can also be tough.  If you have created a blog in order to make some extra cash, then you need to remember one thing that will help you out in the long run.  Just starting a blog will not get you traffic and only posting once in a while will not help either.  One large thing that you need to remember is to stay consistent.  It is important that you stay consistent with your blog topic and you post regularly.

Adding new content to your blog regularly is a good thing to attract new visitors, but as well keep the readers that have come to your blog before.  If you have RSS subscribers, then it is important to keep your blog updated as RSS readers need a reason to keep coming back.  Without updated content, it is too easy for subscribers to move on to another blog with consistent content.  If you are having trouble with keeping your blog updated, then try scheduling out your posts.  There are a lot of occasions when I write multiple posts at one time because the writing bug strikes.  In order to keep everything consistent and regular, I schedule my posts to go out at certain times to make sure my content is regularly updated.  This is an easy way to keep it updated without continually trying to find new posts.  You can also try and get guest bloggers to post on your site with their perspective and that can keep your content fresh.  Just remember, keep it up!

We blog in order to provide our perspective to others, but we have to remember to blog about something that we know.  If you are choosing to blog just in order to make money, then you might not succeed.  You have to know the topic you are writing about in order to keep the blog regularly updated.  Blog about ideas that you are passionate about and have a lot of feelings for.  This is the best way to keep your visitors interested and coming back.  Try not to start a blog about one topic and then change it later down the road because you have ran out of ideas.  If you start your blog, try to find a topic that has a wide range of topics to choose.  This will let you branch out down the road, but still staying under the umbrella of your original topic.

If you want to blog for a living or maybe just make some extra money on the side, then just stay consistent.  Make your posts regular and keep your topic in line.  This will help you out in the long run with creating a great blog that many will want to discover and read time and time again.  If you want traffic that is qualified to your site, then stay on a topic that you care about.  This is the only way to blog!

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If you are looking for a way to increase the visibility of your RSS feed in order to increase your email subscribers, then check out rssHugger.  This is a dedicated site only for RSS feeds and bloggers. At this current time, they have over 5,000 rss feeds for viewers to see in all different types of categories.  You can get your RSS feed put in this dedicated directory by registering and picking the method.

They provide you with two ways to submit your rss feed.  A webmaster can choose to post a review of their site on their own blog and then the listing is free.  This is a great way for new blogs and webmasters to gain visibility of their rss feed.  Another method if you do not want to write a review is to pay a  $20 one-time fee via Paypal.  rssHugger gives each submission their own dedicated page for 10 years.   This calculates out to $2 per year if you just want to pay for the listing.

If you are looking for more ways to increase your RSS feed visibility, then check out rssHugger as another way to do so.  With a larger visibility, then you can slowly increase your rss feed subscribers, which is what every blogger wants to do at some point in time on their blog.

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