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You’ve probably had this happen to you before: you are visiting a website and there is a link that reads “download the manual”, after clicking the link you notice that it’s a link to a .pdf file. The file takes forever to open, scrolling is really slow and the search function takes ages or your browser freezes up completely. Is the Adobe Acrobat format really that bad? I think it’s a pretty nice file format, but reading these files in the internet browser is not my preferred method. Sure you can right-click the link and select the “save as” option, but often I click before I realize it’s a .pdf file.

If you have downloaded any e-books from our books section, you probably noticed that the .pdf files don’t open in your browser, but instead the ‘save as’ window will show. After the download finishes you can open the file with Acrobat Reader and enjoy the e-book with smooth scrolling and fast working search option. In addition to the forced download, a counter is being updated each time someone downloads a book. The number of downloads can be seen in your sites statistics page by default, but by keeping a separate counter you can also show the number of times each file has been downloaded on your page (I have not added that to our books page yet, but might at some point)

If you wonder how I have done this and want to add the same functionality to your own website, you can have a look at this very simple tutorial. You can probably get this to work without any programming experience at all. Your visitors will thank you for it!

While tracking my press release through Google, I found 4 sites who re-published it. It seems that both the press release sites, that have published my news story, are used by other websites as a source of content. One of the sites that has picked up the story is none other than Google News, which hopefully is syndicated by a bunch of other websites!

Like any other blog, you want to get readers on yours. But how exactly can we get the people to come over and visit our blog? Of course we’ll need good content, original content that is. Once we have a few posts on the blog we can start looking around to search for traffic. Where are the people interested in reading a blog on your blogs topic? Well, on other blogs on this topic of course! Now you just have to find ways to get the readers of this other blog to come over to yours. This can be done in several ways:

Commenting on other blogs
You can post comments on other blogs, the comments usually let you put a URL in that will be linked to from your name in the comment. Do make your comments useful, nobody wants comment spammer on their blog and if you seem to be one, chances are, your comments will be deleted.

Guest posting
Since it is a lot of work to constantly come up with new and original material for blog posts, a lot of bloggers will put your post on their blog if you ask them. Just make sure your post is on the subject of the guest blog and make it a good post. I have done my best with a post titled “How I Made $21,496.95 in Just 2 Weeks!” on payment blogger. Judging by the replies on the post I’d say my post was a success.

Blogroll
You can often find other blogs on the same subject that are willing to do a blogroll exchange with you. All that really is is a link exchange: you put a link on your blog and they put one on theirs. If your just starting out your blog, don’t go asking Darren Rowse for a blogroll exchange, that just wouldn’t work. A link exchange like this has to be beneficial to both parties. Look for a blog on the same subject and about the same size as your own. New blogs will more likely want to put a link up for you, since they are probably looking for links themselves .

These are just a few of the ways to get started. This subject has been discussed over and over again, and probably will for a long time to come. You can have a look over at Pro blogger where Darren has made a list of some of the more interesting posts on the subject.

I got the first press release approval back. 1888 Press Release has accepted the submitted news story and has featured it on their website. The time between submitting and approval has been about 17 hours. Scrolling through the stories on the site I see that it isn’t on the front page anymore, there are just too many stories published, giving each story only a very limited exposure.

Another thing I noticed is that, while the website URL has been added to both the story and the company profile, the links are not clickable. So, if you are doing this to get some links pointing to your site, this is not where to submit your story. Still someone might have seen the story and published it on their own website. We’ll have to wait for the story to show up in the search engines to see if anyone is using it.

No confirmation yet from EcommWire, but the story on there can be found through Google.  It also includes a clickable link and the story is featured on the front page. The stories on the front page span 7 days, so this means that they eighter don’t get a lot of submissions, or they don’t approve many.

One way to let the world know about your great new product or service is by sending out a press release. Of course you will need to have something worthy of a press release. I don’t think sending one out for every new blog post or article on your site will do you any good. They will probably just be rejected. But what about the launch of a new website? Since I just launched this site I’ve looked a little deeper into sending out a press release.

Since thousands of new websites are launched daily, this isn’t really something newsworthy, unless you have something revolutionary new. Still, putting out a press release for your website launch could be picked up by a few sites or blogs and give you a little exposure. You know how they say every little bit helps, so lets try this press release thing! Read the rest of this entry »

Darren is running some contests this week to celebrate the birthday of ProBlogger. He has found a huge number of sponsors who have donated a total of over $54,000 in prizes!

Running competitions is a great way to promote your business or blog and with sponsors involved it doesn’t even have to cost you a penny. There’s a new bolded entry on my todo list: find some competition sponsors.

Sad was the day when the Overture Keyword Selector Tool  stopped working. Happy times are back because the tool seems to be working again! It does however use old data, old as in: data from 9 months ago. Some say they have talked to people at Yahoo who claim that the data will not be updated. But even with the old data I think this tool is worth something.

The marketing strategies that can be applied online are endless and new marketing opportunities arise with every new website created. Thousands of new websites are created daily and at the end of the day, most of them are trying to pull in some profit. To make profit, you need traffic; to get traffic, you have to market, simple as that!

Every once in a while a website pops up with a revolutionary new idea that practically markets itself and pulls in millions of profit. The rest of us have to put a lot of effort into marketing to make a website even remotely successful.

Marketing is not only for the websites trying to make money on the web. A lot of websites are merely used to market an off-line business. Marketing your business online becomes increasingly more important as more people use the internet to look for products and services. Even if you run a local business, there is a large group of potential customers you are not reaching when you don’t use online marketing!