Your behavior within online forum discussion groups can affect your online business.  Whether the impact is positive or negative is up to you.  Make sure before entering into discussion groups or posting questions or answers within the forum that you are well rested and alert.  One little mistake while performing these tasks can be the reason for possible mess ups such as tempers flaring or giving information which is not helpful to the forum posters.

What can I expect from people within the online forums?

When participating in an online discussion forum, two things will more than likely happen.  People will either agree with you or disagree with you.  Let us begin with possible scenarios with people who agree with you.

What are my responsibilities?

You have responsibilities to the people within the online discussion group as a sincere business owner.  They will more than likely admire you for such reason.  Make sure you justify their admiration with your behavior.  Do not be a know-it- all.  Be humble.  In other words, do not become a jackass.

What if people disagree with me?

Now, for those who do not agree with you.  Some online forum posters will have valid reasons to not agree with you. You must respect their decision, even if in your eyes they are not displaying logical sense.  Take the criticism gracefully. Do not lash back.  Do not begin nasty verbal wars within the online discussion groups.  This might lead to your being booted out of the discussion group and this is not helpful to your online business.

Forming good relationships

Overall, it is only an online forum.  This is not something, which is equivalent to life or death.  If you want to interact with people within the online forum, you must focus on forming positive and constructive relationships with them.  You might need these people in promoting your business or they may be previous customers or potential customers.

You do not want to damage your reputation within the online discussion forums.  This would not only make yourself look bad but your products and services, which your online business offers.  If you do end up being kicked out of an online discussion group, remember it is ok to lose the game but while not losing the lesson.  Learn from your mistakes while ensuring it does not happen again.  When it comes to our behavior, sometimes we are our own worst enemies.

Remember you are representing your company as well as your products and services.  People do not want to deal with hot heads or someone who will not listen to them.  Your business depends on your professional demeanor you portray to the online forum posters.  Act accordingly and you will see that things will fall into place.  When in doubt, just be professional, remember why you are in the online forum in the first place, it’s not to truly make friends, it’s about generating business for your products and services

The popularity of your website is an important gauge to determining the success of your business.  Internet marketing, then, aims at helping you promote your site as efficiently as possible using a variety of techniques that take advantage of the technology that is available online.  Most people rely heavily on the strength of SEO articles that pique interest and then guide readers to your site directly.  There is a second way, though, that is often overlooked, and it can be much more effective if used properly.

Backlinking is a marketing term that refers to a kind of third party referral where you submit a blog, article, or other media to an outside site that contains a link that leads back to your homepage.  There are two basic kinds of backlinks that you can take advantage of.

Two-way backlinks, are the most beneficial because it requires that you establish a symbiotic relationship with the host of another site.  You exchange link information on an equal service basis, meaning that you can post content and links on their site, and in return they can post on yours.  You most often will do this within your niche market so that you are both attracting and referring visitors with similar interests.
The second way is, of course, the one-way backlink.

You do this of your own accord, and it is usually much more efficient because it takes less time to set up.  Submit your information to the different social networking sites and web directories, much like you would an SEO article and let the reputed web crawlers do the work.

1) Keywords: This is the core of all SEO marketing. Search engines are based on an index of keywords that web crawlers use to identify the relevance of sites based on search engine inquiries. The more relevant, specific, and unique your keywords are, the better your chances of performing highly in a search engine inquiry. Free tools, like Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker, can help you if this is difficult, which it probably will be in the beginning.

2) Titles: Along with keywords, a unique and catchy title will surely attract many curious visitors to the content on your site. The more enticing and interesting your title the better the chances are that visitors will return for more later.

3) Backlinks: This is the most technical aspect of SEO marketing. Backlinking entails links that you have embedded into an article that you posted on a third party site that will direct a visitor back to your site. The more backlinks you post on quality, highly-visible sites, the more likely your traffic will increase from referrals. When your links are clicked from these third-party sources, web crawlers recognize this as an increase in your popularity, which boosts your optimization rating.

4) Directories: You can easily and quickly submit your site to a variety of web directories, like Google and Yahoo. All you have to do is go to each particular search engine and fill out the form they supply for web site directory submission. This will automatically add your site and the related links to the web crawler index, which will update your score every time it searches the web.

You can find many free WordPress themes on www.wordpress.org and by doing a Google search for “Free WordPress themes”.

Domain Registars

GoDaddy is one of lowest priced Domain Name suppliers and is very easy to work with. They also have very good telephone support.

Web Hosting

We have used both Bluehost and Hostmonster to host our websites. This site is being hosted by Hostmonster.

There are websites where you can purchase graphics and nice themes for a reasonable price. The cost of these items is much less than paying a webmaster foreven  a simple business card style website. It is easy to add content as you find the time to learn more about how it all works.

I would purchase a domain for $7.99 per year and host it with one of the $4.95-$6.95 per month webhosts rather than host it on one of the free hosts. You will be able tgo customize your Blog easier and have more options. If they were to close your account or go out of business you may not have a backup and could lose all of your data. This can also be the case with a self-hosted WordPress site, but there is an easy to use Database Backup Plugin that only takes a few minutes to install and setup.

I’ll list some of the theme sites and hosts where you can host your WordPress application in my next post. Even though WordPress is mostly called a Blog, it can easily be used as a content managemnet system (CMS) with the right theme. Other than saying “Powered by WordPress” a the bottom of the page, you probably would not know it was not a custom formatted website.

Have a game plan in mind.  If you are a Jamaica specialist and have traveled to the Island many times, let it be known. If there are side trips, excursions that are different from the traditional resort or cruise ship excursion, publish this information. Your readers will appreciate your advice and may contact you for booking assistance for their  next vacation.

If you have personal photos that show the destination, this will add more impact to your story. Like they say, “a picture is worth a 1000 words”.

Once you optimize your website for images, your site will appear in image search results and pick up new visitors and potential customers. Optimizing your site for images isn’t instantaneous and will require some time and effort, but it’s worth it. Here are some ways to do it.

Ask yourself, “How can we use images on our website?” What kind of images “go” with your website? You want your traffic to be targeted, so you have to put some thought into it. That means that unless you’re in the bikini business, pictures of women in bikinis may get you traffic, but there would only be a random chance that any of those visits would result in sales.

Once you have an idea, you have to get an image that you can use legally. There are several ways to do this. You can create them yourself if you’re a decent photographer who is reasonably well-versed in PhotoShop. If you do this, you need to add a watermark or some other indication that the rights to the picture belong to you. Image theft happens all the time, and you certainly don’t want your picture selling your competitor’s product.

Another way to get an image for your website is to hire a freelancer to do it. You can also find large databases of free images on the web, and of course, you can buy them from a stock photography site.

Once you have an image or images, you can optimize them for image search. Start by dealing with the alt tags. When you hover your mouse over an image, the text you see is the alt tag, and it increases keyword density in the eyes of the search bots. They help the engine crawlers determine the relevance of the image. Additionally, the alt tag is what will show when users have the pictures disabled in their browser. Use your targeted keywords in your alt tags, but you don’t have to waste them on words like picture, image, etc. because they’re usually already attributed to the search query.

If you are able, include the file name with your keywords, as long as they make sense. It is better to use hyphens rather than underscores to separate words. You should also avoid duplicating images. Say you have the same image, only in several sizes: you don’t want all of them to get indexed. What you can do is deny search robots access to the ones you don’t want indexed.

Finally, build links to the pages where the images are. One good way to do that is to submit your page to a social bookmarking site like Digg. All the extra back links you get will eventually add up to a healthy search engine ranking.

Good search engine optimization is an advertising campaign in itself almost. The higher your website ranks on search engines, the more traffic you’ll get, so you want a website that is search engine friendly. But before you worry about SEO, make sure you have a well designed site. You want your business to reflect your site and your business philosophy. You want your site to be interesting, unique, and (this is extremely important) easy to navigate. If your visitors risk going deep into the pages of your site with no clear way back out, they’ll be frustrated. Maybe so frustrated that they don’t want to shop there. A well-designed website is a great investment that will probably quickly pay for itself in increased visitor numbers and sales.

The logical placement of your web pages is an important part of search engine optimization. The “deep” pages of your site can hurt or help your search engine standings. If you can get back links to pages other than the home page, that will help tremendously. These are known as deep links and are highly regarded by search engines. The logic is, “If people are linking to his page that’s only about extended wear contact lenses, they must really like the home page.” Make your site easy to shop at and put good content on all the pages. A user-friendly site is a well ranked site.

Have a reliable web hosting company. Not only should they give you plenty of disk space and bandwidth, plus extras like a bunch of email accounts, they should guarantee uptime of better than 99.5%. Nobody can guarantee you 100% uptime, because things break and tornadoes go through, and there’s no way to keep the servers absolutely safe. But they can come really close. Remember, on the Internet, there’s no such thing as opening and closing hours. Even if your site is only down for an hour or two, if you’re getting thousands of hits a day, that means that a bunch of them weren’t able to use your site and consequently, weren’t able to buy any of your products or services. Fortunately, good, affordable web hosting is more available than ever. There are enough hosting companies that they all want to do something to set themselves above the others. Reliability and real 24/7/365 technical help are extremely important qualities for your web hosting company to have.

Your website is as important to your business as your advertising campaign, so you want to have the best site you can afford. Your business’s website should be attractive, easy to navigate, and friendly to the major search engines. Search engine optimization is a function of having a reliable, navigable site that is keyword rich with excellent content.

Being on a 7 night FAM with the wrong supplier can be a huge waste of time and money! If your idea of a FAM is a cheap vacation, you are not being realistic and are not really adding to your destination knowledge. Knowledge is King in the travel industry and the more you know and can properly advise a client, the more sucessful you can be.