Many website owners join Topsites List sites as a means of free advertising, to gain more exposure for their websites. It’s great way to get your link out there, and free is in anyone’s budget. Some website owners also create their own topsites list sites; even we have one at OBJ, The Online Business Junction Top 100 Sites list. It’s a great way to let folks who visit or follow OBJ add their link and market their websites.

One of the pitfalls of running a topsites list is the tendency of website owners to completely ignore their list site once it’s setup.  And to me, that’s just not good business. Your topsites list is a direct reflection of your website, and of you as its owner. As such, you should work to maintain that list and the integrity of your professionalism as a business owner. So below are some things that I see all too often on topsites list pages, and they are things you should work to avoid.

1. Broken Image Links: This is really one of the biggest things to avoid because it makes your entire topsites list page look sloppy and unprofessional. If your list contains a lot of broken image links where members’ banners should be, you need to either remove them, or email the members to request the correct URLs for their banners and update them. Make it a habit to check your topsites page at least once a month and get rid of those broken links.
2. Too Many Ads: A lot of topsites list owners sell ad space at the top of their list pages. That’s fine. But when you have too many ads, that’s a problem. I’ve seen topsites list sites with 30 or 40 ads at the top, before I even get the list members banners. Some have more ads at the bottom too! You want to have a well-populated and active topsites list membership, but why should anyone bother to join your list if their own ads will never get noticed? Keep your ads to a minimum–no more than 10 or 15 (less is always better).
3. Reset Never: If your list is set to never reset, that means that new members pretty much have zero chance of ever having their banner link make it to the first page. I visit lists all the time where the front page members have hundreds of  hits in, so this is the tip off to me that the list never resets. Once I scroll down to the bottom of the list, I can usually confirm this because it will say, Next Reset: Never. And guess what? I don’t join those lists. You  need to give ALL your list members a fair chance to reach the first page. What’s the point of having it otherwise? At the very least, your list should be set to reset every 30 days.
4. List Ambiguity: I have seen far too many topsites list pages without a clear explanation of whom their list is targeted to. If you’re promoting primitive or country sites, your list should say so. If you’re promoting WAHM sites,  or Jewelry sites or Doll sites, whatever it may be, your list should say so. Make it clear to potential members and shoppers exactly what kind of sites can be found on your list. Either make it clear in the title of your list, or add a descriptive paragraph at the top of the list page with this information.
5. Unreadable Fonts: Many topsites list pages have fonts that are extremely difficult to read. The fonts may be too small, or an odd color, or just too busy a font to read. Again, this just looks sloppy and unprofessional. If your goal is to help other website owners promote their business and get more traffic, then their website information needs to be readable. So choose fonts that are large enough, simple enough, and a readable color that is easy on the eyes.

And just two final points to ponder…if you join topsites lists. First, don’t put your voting banner links on the main page of your website. The reason is pretty simple: you work hard to drive traffic to your website, so why send it away to other sites as soon as it gets there?! Create a new page for your voting links, and just link to that page from your main page. And second, click on your voting links yourself on occasion! The whole point of joining the list is to get more exposure, and to do that, you need to try to get to the front page of the list (because that’s where it’s going to get noticed!). That won’t happen without votes. So help yourself out and vote for yourself once in awhile.

There are a lot of people selling from their blogs these days, either as an additional way to generate sales, or as a means to replace web hosting that they may no longer be able to afford in our struggling economy.

If you are interested in selling from your blog, please check out my article in the latest issue of Creative Times Magazine. I offer information and advice on how to do just that within the article. Click the link below to be taken to the magazine’s download page.

Selling From Your Blog Article at Creative Times Magazine

A lot of people are blogging these days for business. They might be using their blog as a means of establishing a web presence, and it’s a great free way to do that. Or they may be using their blog as a marketing tool, advertising sales, specials, new products and services and the like. Many people also sell products or services directly from their blogs too. So blogging can be an important and beneficial tool for almost any business.

No matter what your business-related reason for blogging, good SEO is essential for your blog, just as it is for any other website. And one thing you can do to help improve your blog’s SEO is to add meta tags to the Template. If you aren’t sure how to do that, here are some simple directions for doing so.

NOTE: The content editor in this WordPress site tends to alter things in HTML code and they don’t display correctly on the page. This generally affects apostrophes and quotation marks. When you copy the code below, please retype the apostrophes and quotation marks yourself, before pasting the code in your Blogger template. Otherwise, it may not work. And be sure to work in a plain text document, rather than a word processor like Word or Works, etc. Those programs also tend to reformat HTML code.

1. Login to your account at Blogger.
2. Click on Layout, and then click on Edit HTML.
3. Search for the following bit of code, which will likely be near the top of the template.

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

4.  Directly underneath that bit of code, paste the following code:

<meta content=’PUT DESCRIPTION HERE’ name=”description”/>
<meta content=’PUT KEYWORDS HERE’ name=”keywords”/>
<meta content=’PUT AUTHOR NAME HERE’ name=”author”/>

Be sure to replace the content for your Description, Keywords, and Author Name, where indicated. And don’t forget to save  your changes.

I just found another really great file storage, online backup, and sharing site. It’s called:

Dropbox

Install this program and any time you add files to it, they are instantly backed up online. Install it on multiple computers and sync them, and then whatever files you add to your Dropbox on one computer will automatically appear on the other computer as well. This, my friends, will save ME a lot of work. Normally, when I want to transfer files from my laptop to my desktop PC or vice versa, I have one of three options:

1. Copy the files to a flash drive and use that to transfer.
2. Upload the files to a storage site online on one computer, then go to the other computer and snag them from online.
3. Email them to myself between computers.

Those methods all work, but they are much more time-consuming. Dropbox will speed up this process and move it right along! You can also create public folders to share documents between friends, family, or colleagues.

Their basic 2GB account is free. You can upgrade to various levels of paid versions, the cheapest being 50GB for $9.95 per month. I’m starting with the free version, because I think that will do me nicely for awhile. This is really one of the coolest file storage/backup sites I’ve seen for awhile, so I had to share it with you. And hey, you can get free extra storage space, simply by referring someone, OR by following someone’s referral link! Now that’s what I call a perk!

I’ve just posted two new pages to Online Business Junction. One page has resources for a variety of Etsy Tools.  The other is a page about Favicons, providing resources for online favicon generators, along with instructions on how to add a favicon to your website, and to your Blogger blog. Check them out when you have a chance.

If you’re in the market for labels and tags you can print on, check out this great site, Ripped Sheets. They have a wide of variety of products, including vinyl sheets for creating your own window clings, hang tags, printable waterproof fabric, magnets, printable duct tape (yeah, duct tape!), Baby on Board signs, and more. Lots of goodies there for those of you who do a lot of your own printing.

Also note that I’ve added some new services for anyone interested.  DIYeStores Help, and Go Top 100 Setup. More services are likely to follow. Check back.

Take care, all.

1. It prevents people from right-clicking to open other parts of your website in a new tab or window.
2. It prevents people from right-clicking to open links to other websites that you have on your site.
3. It prevents people from right-clicking to bookmark your website.
4. It prevents people with web-based email accounts (like Hotmail and Yahoo, etc) from right-clicking to copy your email address in order to send you an email.
5. It doesn’t stop people who know they can view your site’s source code to get the URL of an image and steal it that way.
6. It doesn’t stop people who know they can do a Print Screen to copy the page the image is on; and then they can use any graphics program to crop the photo they want and save it.
7. If your script generates a message like, “Don’t Steal My Images,” you can offend your customers who were trying to do no such thing, and send them on their merry way…to someone else’s website.

If you really want to protect your images, there’s one easy solution: watermark them! You can do this yourself with a graphics program; there are even websites that allow you to do it online. Or you can pay someone to do it for you. Either way, that is the best way to protect your website’s images.

For further reading…

Watermarking Photos

Graphics Tools

]]> http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2009/12/11/right-click-much/feed/ 0 http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2009/12/01/twitter-tool/ http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2009/12/01/twitter-tool/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:42:37 +0000 admin http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/?p=558 I just came across a great website that allows you to customize your Twitter background. It’s a free service, and very easy to use.  It allows you to add themes, photos, and text, so you can coordinate with your website design in minutes. Whether you Twitter and Tweet for business or casually, you may find this service very helpful.

Free Twitter Designer

Backup Outlook Express

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