If a visitor does not immediately like what they see, they leave. Formatting your website content appropriately is essential to secure your visitors’ interest and getting them to come back.

Mastering this can be the difference between making a couple pennies a day with your website or hitting six figures by the end of the year.

The images below demonstrate the steps of morphing your blog or website text to appease visitors.

Step 0. Initial block of text.

Step 1: Paragraphs broken down into smaller pieces…

Step 2: Highlight important elements…

Step 3: Subheadings to create a flow…

Step 4: Bulleted and numbered lists instead of paragraph format…

Step 5 FINAL: Add visual elements and cut out non-essential text…

This last version is much more scannable. It doesn’t matter how good your content is, if no one reads it in the first place.

Tags: Web Design, Starting a blog, Formatting

Instead of clicking through your favorite websites, why not have all the latest information delivered right to one source? This is where an RSS reader comes in.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is basically a feed of a website’s latest content. Get setup with an RSS reader, and you can have all the latest content spoon fed to you.

Here’s how the process works:

1. Subscribe to the feed of a website you like. You can do this by clicking on the RSS icon. The RSS feed icon of Elementary Marketing is located on the top right of the page.

2. Login to your RSS reader anytime you want to see the more recent content, and all your feeds and placed in this one location.

To login to an RSS reader, you need to set one up. Go with a user-friendly, popular RSS reader like Google Reader or Bloglines.

For now on, you simply go to one website to get the latest content from dozens.

Still unclear about what is RSS and how to use it? Check out this extremely simple video…

Tags: RSS, Bloglines, Google Reader, Blogging

When searching for the best web hosting company, you have literally thousands of options. Many web hosts claim to be the cheapest or include the best features. However, most of these web hosts are stretching the truth or not good for newbies.

Based on three major criteria points, the best web host for any kind of website is HostGator.

HostGator is an award-winning hosting provider and the all-around best option.

Here’s the three reasons to choose HostGator:

1. Top-notch customer support — Never underestimate the importance of being able to get an actual customer service person on the phone in a matter of seconds. If you ever experience a problem with your website (and you likely will), you want help immediately.

Every second your website is not working properly, you lose business. Many web hosts either don’t have customer support or its impossible to get an actual human helper on the phone.

2. Trust — Hosting providers pop up and disappear all the time, but HostGator has been around forever. Other reputable review sites and companies consistently award HostGator the top spot for its reliability and standards.

3. Features and Price — Whether you just need a blog or a full-blown corporate website, HostGator can handle your requirements. The speed, bandwidth and free add-ons included with HostGator are all you’ll ever need.

The additional features include pre-installed blogging software, security enhancements, shopping carts, small business solutions, email systems, website statistic applications, cPanel/Fantastico, and more. And you’ll pay less than ten bucks a month.

This website is even hosted by HostGator.

Create Your First Blog Post And Blog Page

Choosing A Theme For Your Blog

Install And Use Plugins

What Is RSS, And Why You Need It

Go through this checklist to ensure your site is optimized and ready to begin climbing up in the search rankings.

Keywords in the <title> tag

Keywords in the domain name

Keyword-rich content

Keywords in other major positions (headline tags, alt tags, anchor text)

Inbound links from reputable sites

Internal links throughout your content

Original (non-duplicate) content

Minimal page load speed

Web-friendly text and clean coding

Original (non-duplicate) content

Dynamic sitemap

Good permalink structure

This is just a simple compilation of the major elements. There are literally dozens more key elements to search engine optimization.

Tags: seo, search engine optimization, content, tags, permalinks, keywords, keyword research

This is a bad move.

Your niche should be laser focused. Instead of trying to relate to millions, try relating to thousands or even hundreds. Your audience is smaller but more targeted.

Here’s a great real-life example:

You have an eye infection and need to visit a doctor. Do you want to visit a general practitioner or eye specialist? You want the specialist. You perceive a doctor with a narrow focus to have more specialization in that field.

You want someone who knows a lot about one thing rather than a little about a lot of things.

The same is true with niche marketing. Frame yourself as a specialist in one area and you’ll be perceived as the go-to person in that realm.

If you’re starting a blog or any type of online presence, try going too narrow. I bet you can’t. There is an audience for anything.

Interested in food? Keep drilling down. What aspect of food? Cooking, dieting, restaurants, grilling, desserts? How culture plays a role in food? Which preservatives to avoid? Living as a vegetarian?

How about cooking for engineers? Funny, right? Here’s a site with that exact niche…and it grabs over 100,000 visitors a month.

Tags: niche marketing, starting a blog, target audience

Website users have short attention spans. We are all quick to hit the back button if we don’t find what we’re looking for immediately.

The purpose of your website must be crystal clear. How many times have you landed on a website and not been able to grasp the basis of the site right away? In those cases, chances are you left the page quickly.

If I landed on your website, would I know precisely what your website is all about? If not, you have some work to do. Take a look at the tagline or description of your website. First of all, make sure you have one. Secondly, does it sum up your site?

Website visitors need to know they are in the right place to meet their specific demand. Fail to deliver the intention or summary of your website in a matter of seconds, and you’ll lose traffic.

To develop your own tagline or elevator pitch, imagine yourself sitting at a bar. After stiking up a conversation with the bartender, he asks you what you do for a living. You tell him your business name, which means nothing to him, so he rightfully asks, “what does your company do?”

Your plain-English answer is your elevator pitch. Make sure its on your website, front and center.

Tags: copywriting, web design, branding

After grasping the basics of what is a blog, you need to utilize some of the more intermediate features of a blogging to bring in more traffic and ultimately increase the value of your blog. The single most effective way to enhance your blog is to use hyperlinks.

The first way to link your blog is to add some internal links. These are links within one of your posts that point to another one of your posts. This keeps traffic on your site, allowing people to click around easily from article to article. The more time a visitor spends on your site, the better.

Also consider that many visitors on your site are browsing it for the first time ever, so you want to help guide them through your articles. Any time you begin touching on something you have previously discussed in a blog post, make it a link.

This also helps with search engine optimization (<–Look, an internal link!). Search engine spiders actually crawl your webpages and follow links. So, website spiders hop to additional articles on your website they might not have discovered otherwise.

The second method of linking your blog involves external links. These links point to other websites, and improve your visitor’s experience by showing them other useful resources. Think of this as citing your sources.

Linking directly to other blog posts often times helps your own search engine optimization and helps to yield more traffic. That’s because of a blogging feature called trackbacks, which is an automated way to get more links to your website.

Basically, any time you provide a link to someone else’s blog post, you get a link on their site pointing back to you. So, it helps to link externally.

Because of this, blogs feed off one another. For example, TechCrunch recently posted an anti-voicemail article (<–Look, an external link!). Other popular blogs such as WebWorkerDaily wrote a similar post simply commenting on the original article. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Spend just as much time reading other blogs as writing your own. And when you write your own blog posts, include some hyperlinks and watch your results improve exponentially.

Tags: webworkerdaily, techcrunch, hyperlinks, search engine optimization

As stated above, the domain name just includes the first portion of the website address and not necessarily the entire website address. If you are at “www.TimsWeddingPhotos.com/February/Smith-Wedding/pic23_2″…the domain name is still just TimsWeddingPhotos.com.

A domain name is just the name given to your website and not the same as a website host, which is your actual space on the internet. You need to register a domain name to have an internet site, and you can do this for just several dollars a month.

GoDaddy is the most common place to register a domain name. You can buy a name for less than $10 a year. Before buying the domain name, you might need to do a domain name search to find an available name because many of your top choices are already registered.

You can buy a variety of domain name extensions, but stick with only .coms and not the other domain extensions. Your domain name is your online business name, so choose wisely.

Tags: godaddy, google, domain names, what is a domain name

No matter what type of website you have, you need a host. You have plenty of options for low cost hosting, and you can even sign up for free web hosting. However, the quality of your website hosting is closely related to the price. So, sign up for free website hosting and you may “pay the price” later on.

Free website hosts frequently crash and have poor customer service. This means your website is frequently offline and not accessible online. And when you want to get some direct help, you can’t get anyone at customer support on the phone.

The best website hosting is a provider with great additional features and commendable customer support. This is not easy to find, but it does exist. Here are the advantages and disadvantages or free web hosting:

Advantages
1. Free — obviously

2. Simple — you can typically set up a website or start a blog in a matter of minutes even with limited technical ability

3. Quick SEO results — your website is attached to a credible domain name, so you automatically get some initial search engine optimization benefits.

Disadvantages
1. Limited customization — you’ll have only slight ability to make changes to the design and structure of your website. This might not matter right away, but in time, you’ll want the ability to professionally manage your own site.

2. Limited control — the free web host is the ultimate owner of your website, so you don’t have complete control. You own the content, but they own the URL.

3. Generic domain name and poor long-term SEO — your domain name extension will be shared by many others. Instead of a domain name like elementarymarketing.com, your name will be elementarymarketing.webhost.com.

Which Web Host Is Best For Me?
If you only have limited expectations for your website and aren’t aspiring to have an actual online identity of business, you can use a free web host. But if you’re serious about your online business, you need to make the small investment and purchase a web host.

Tags: hostgator, website host, hosting