Online Marketing Methods

There are a number of very effective ways to promote your website online that often have nothing to do with search engines – here are a few of them:

Purchasing banners or other ad space

Banner ads or smaller square and rectangular ads are often seen on many websites, including search engines. These ads normally cost money to have them displayed. Some websites will also offer a banner or ad exchange, which means if you put their banner ad on your site, they will put your banner ad on their site. These commercial ads can be very useful when displayed on prominent web sites. You will be required to provide the banner or display ad in a specific size, which will then be installed on the ad site and will be used to "click through" to your site. Make sure that you get details of the types and volumes of visitors that are viewing these sites, and their demography, so that you stay within your targeted group.

Purchase Pay-per-click advertising

Some of the search engines like Google and other types of websites offer a variety of plans for promoting your website on their website. The advantage of these ads or links on other websites is that you pay when someone actually “clicks” through to your website from theirs (most also have some sort of a nominal sigh-up fee) This method of advertising is called pay-per-click and can be quite a cost-effective method of advertising your website. The other advantage of pay-per-click is that you have the ability to selectively target specific clients, based on the criteria you select (key search words). Most websites that offer pay-per-click also allow the advertiser to monitor and manage their own accounts. This means you can create an online marketing plan as simple or complicated as you need.

Purchase Search Engine or Directory space

Some search engines and directory services provide fees for service in getting your website listed. Some of the search engines that currently offer some fees for service include: Yahoo, AskJeeves, Inktomi, Lycos, and Excite. Paying for search engine listings seems to be the trend of the future: look around for cost-effective sources and make sure you do your research before you signing up for this type of service now that you know what you are looking for. Paying for search engine or directory services can be a cost-effective way to ensure your website is given prominent display. As with all other forms of promotion, this will require some research on your part because this is a constantly changing market. I just want you to be aware that this is an option that you may want to consider.

Link exchanges

Link exchanges simply mean putting a link on your website for another website, while other websites put links to your website on theirs. This is normally a free exchange between consenting websites; it benefits you in two ways.

First, you may get a link to your website from other sites (this is called an in-link). Second, some search engines take your in-links into consideration with regard to your placement. The more in-links you have, the higher you are placed on some of the search engines.

Newsgroups

These are also called (Discussion) Forums and are simply online discussion groups. Special readers (a software program designed specifically for online discussions) may be required to view newsgroups or forums. Before you enter into any of these Discussion Forms a word of caution. Advertising on many of these is often considered taboo, make sure you know the “rules of the form”. The good news is that there are often non-threatening ways of going about getting a message out. MAKE SURE you understand the do's and don'ts before you start using these services as you may face some cruel criticism (or worse) for not following their guidelines. Newsgroups can be accessed through most e-mail programs, and listings for newsgroups can be found by accessing this feature in your e-mail program.

One way to “sneak” advertising into Forms and Discussions is to simply use the Domain Name of your website in the body of your text, almost as a by-product of a question or statement. What you DO NOT want to do is blatantly tell everyone to go to your website “for great deals” or some other obvious reason. This is sure to cause friction with other members of the group. Another way of “quietly”advertising your website is to use it in the signature of your emails (email signatures will also covered later).

Listservs or List Groups

These are similar to newsgroups with the exception that they use Internet browsers or e-mail programs for communication. Like Newsgroups there are often rules that need to be followed but promotion "done in good taste" with these sites is often acceptable. Listservs can be more difficult to find and are often associated with special interest topics. Internet searches are a good place to start. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of newsgroups and listserve-type services available. Finding listings for these in your area will take some work. Some may be listed on Internet website pages while others are only found through word of mouth with people who use them. You may need to call some web hosting companies or other business groups in your area in order to find listings for these groups. If you do join some of these, follow their guidelines and you will be rewarded by an increase in traffic to your website.

Direct email

Direct email refers to manually sending emails to prospective clients one email at a time. One of the drawbacks with direct email is that it takes time to do. The advantage is that it is often more rewarding in its return as emails are directed to specific people or groups. Direct email is an ideal way to create a list of followers for your website, company or products.E-mail is easy to use and targeted directly to specific people. See also Opt-in Lists.

Email also has some risks. Even if you send emails to “prospective clients” one at at time, some recipients of these email will still perceive them as “spam emails”. As the Internet and email become more widely used SPAM email is becoming more and more a problem. There are a number of anti-spam organizations that are quite aggressive toward spammers. Don’t get caught in their net, do your research. Some companies have de-listed email contacts from them because of spam abuse to their employees. Some companies have installed complicated “filters” to eliminate unwanted email.

What I have found the most effective lately is to call prospective clients by telephone and during that conversation get their email.

Opt-in lists

Bookmark This Website, Subscribe, Sign in, Fill out survey, Enter Contest and Newsletters – All of these are a form of "opt-in" marketing ideas that work. They are also referred to as “Permission Marketing” because when a customer "signs up" they are, in effect, giving you permission to send them messages (emails).

Be aware that some of these kinds of website promotion can be quite time consuming, but some can really expand your market niche. Creating a consistently effective newsletter for example can test many people patience. Making one newsletter is not too hard, but try making a newsletter every month for a few years, that is a challenge.

Automated programs can be added to most websites to help manage the lists of names and email addresses of people who “opt-in” to your program.

Adding Dreamweaver Behaviors To Your Web Pages by Andrew Whiteman

Adding Dreamweaver Behaviors To Your Web Pages by Andrew WhitemanJavaScript is an easy-to-use programming language which runs client-side (on each web surfer's computer) and adds useful or decorative interactivity to web pages. No extra plug-ins need to be installed into the browser for JavaScript to run and, although it can be disabled by users to stop script running, it is safe to assume that any JavaScript code added to your pages will run on the vast majority of the computers of visitors to your site. Dreamweaver allows you to add JavaScript to your code automatically and easily by using "behaviors".

A Dreamweaver behavior is an automatically generated JavaScript function which is activated by a given user or browser action. To use behaviors, choose Window > Behaviors. Before attaching a behavior, you must highlight one of the elements on your page such as a hyperlink or image. Then you need to choose a behavior by clicking on the plus sign in the top left of the Behaviors window.

Dreamweaver attempts to guess the event that you would like to trigger the behavior such as an onMouseOver, onClick or OnDoubleClick. If it guesses the wrong event, simply choose the correct event from the drop-down menu next to the name of the event.

Dreamweaver has a wide selection of behaviors. However, they fall into four main categories: images, windows and alerts, forms and form fields and CSS. To see how behaviors work, let us look at some examples of some behaviors in each of those categories.

There was a time when almost every website featured the rollover effect on its navigation buttons. With the development of CSS, this is no longer the case. However, the facility of having an image change appearance when the mouse passes over it is still useful. Dreamweaver achieves this effect with the "Swap Image" behavior which can either be added to an image or can be created automatically by inserting a rollover image (Insert > Image Objects > Rollover Image) rather than a static one.

Dreamweaver's "Open Browser Window" behavior allows you to create the controversial JavaScript pop-ups. Due to its extensive misuse, many people have developed an extreme intolerance of this feature. However, there are situations where it is useful. For example, if a user is in the middle of filling out a form and clicks a help icon next to a certain item, a pop-up window is an ideal method of displaying the help topic.

The most important and useful form-handling behavior is "Validate Form". This can be triggered either on submission of the form ("onSubmit") or when a given text field loses focus ("onBlur"). When you assign the behavior, you choose the type of validation you wish to perform: ensuring that the field has not been left blank, contains a valid email address, contains a number or contains a number between two specific values.

Dreamweaver contains a couple of very useful behaviors which manipulate the content of HTML elements. To use these, you need to give the element and ID (for example,

). The DIV element offers the greatest flexibility when using this behavior since it can contain just about anything you want. You highlight the element which will trigger the behavior and then choose Show/Hide Elements from the Behaviors panel menu. Click on any listed element then click either the Show or Hide button.

If you have used several JavaScript behaviors on a page, you may find that the amount of code generated by Dreamweaver becomes quite significant. It is therefore usually a good idea to place all of this code in an external JavaScript file and then link this file to your page. To do this, click on the "Code" button in the top left of the page and locate the SCRIPT tags which contain the JavaScript. Select all of the code between the SCRIPT tags and cut it to the clipboard. Next, create a blank file with the file extension .js and paste all of the code inside it. Finally, to link your page to the .js file, position your cursor inside the opening SCRIPT tag and type src = "myfile.js" substituting the name of your JavaScript file for "myfile.js".

How To Watch Satellite TV On Your PC by Tony Rocks

It only makes sense to transcend this technology to the PC. There are so many internet video outlets, but none compare to the HD quality that your get from your satellite TV receiver. You do have a few options that can show you how to watch shows on your PC.

The first option that allows you to watch satellite channelon your PC is a hardware device called a PCTV card. There are may brands and formats of satellite PCTV cards, many available at your local technology stores. Pick the TV card that is most compatible for your PC. I prefer the external satellite PCTV (or any TV card for that matter) because I use a laptop and there is no room to add a PCI or AGP satellite TV video card. Also beware that new PCI cards are not compatible with the older PCI slots.

If you have desktop PC, then by all means, if you have the space and you don't mind fiddling around with your PC tower, purchase an internal satellite PCTV card.

The second option involves using a piece of PC (or MAC) satellite TV software. The options aren't as plentiful as the hardware card, but if you are in no mood to spend hundreds of dollars on hardware and installation then the satellite TV software option is the way to go. Prices range from $50 and up for good quality software.

Once the software is installed then you are ready to start to watch satellite TV on your PC for free.