Read this interesting post here:

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/color-psychology-website-design/

There is no piece of virtual real estate more valuable than the newsletter sign-up box.

This is where visitors to your site can raise their hand to say: I’m curious. I’m interested. Tell me more. Keep in touch. (And this is why it’s so important to HAVE a newsletter…to develop a relationship with the people who raise their hand!)

Follow these 5 practices with your newsletter sign-up boxes to maximize the effectiveness of your website and attract more interested folks to your contact list.

1. Make your sign-up box easily visible on your website. A great high-profile location: the right-hand side of your header. Put your sign-up box on every page of your website. You never know which page of your site someone’s going to land on; it would be a shame if they missed the opportunity to sign up for your newsletter.

2. Give visitors an incentive to sign up. For example: an assessment, an e-book, a special report. Long gone are the days when “Sign up for my newsletter” was all you needed. Today, you MUST give folks a freebie that gives value and introduces them to you.

3. Describe the benefits. Let people know the benefits of receiving your newsletter. In other words, what do they “get” from the content in your newsletter? This can be brief, or you can link to a page that describes the benefits and content in greater detail.

4. Don’t ask for too much information. When you ask for too much information, you risk what’s known as “form abandonment.” All you really need is first name and email address. You can ask for more later in the relationship.

5. Include your privacy policy. People want to be reassured that their contact info is respected. This stated policy doesn’t have to be legalese or bureaucratese. It’s just an extension of your voice. My privacy policy states: “We NEVER rent, sell or share your information. Period.” (That’s because I LOVE to use all caps for emphasis, and I really enjoy one word sentences!)

The bottom line: don’t ignore this little box. How you treat it will make the difference between a drizzle and a flood of new contacts.

About the author:
Linda Claire Puig is a newsletter marketing expert and founder of Ready2Go Articles, Ready2Go Ezines, Ready2Go Article Brochures and other Ready2Go services, which all provide independent, service-based professionals with high-quality, professionally written, done-for-you content to grow their businesses.

An award-winning writer for 25 years, Linda’s articles have appeared in newspapers, magazines and newsletters throughout the world.

She has produced newsletters for associations, small businesses and solo-professionals since 1990 and has trained thousands of individuals in “the way of the newsletter.”

Linda is also an actor, she loves to travel, and all manner of dogs catch her eye.

My advice regarding commenting is to find 5 active blogs that you would like to dedicate to commenting on regularly. One for each day of the week! Add this to your marketing schedule (which I hope you have!) and the rewards of commenting will begin to show! I hope you choose mine and Tracy’s as 3 of them (hint, hint!)

Happy Commenting!
Sherry Lynn

You might be wondering what all the talk is about Kooday. Well, if you knew from the beginning what Yahoo and, better yet, Google was going to become when it was first beginning, wouldn’t you want to be in on your share of the profit? That’s precisely what you have placed in front of you right now. You can sign up for a free account with Kooday, fund it with as little as $5.00, and start buying ten-cent keywords today.

What is the beauty of buying ten-cent keywords? First, since you’re getting in at the beginning stages, you can find thousands of keywords for as little as ten cents. Once you own that keyword, you can link your website to the Kooday directory, and your link to your web site with that keyword is permanent, whether you sell that keyword later, or not. In other words, once you link your site to that keyword, even if you no longer own it, when people search on Kooday for your search term, you will forever maintain a listing in Kooday’s search engine directory.

How to Make Money on Kooday…

All the talk about this “people owned search engine” is viral, and don’t think for a second it is without merit.  Kooday was established July 22, 2010 and already has .05% of the world wide web traffic going through it.  Every day, every week, and every month, this traffic is going to increase exponentially.

Why is Kooday growing so fast?  Because it accommodate every pocketbook.  You can establish an account for free and refer all your friends to it, and earn residuals from their keyword ownership, or you can fund it with as little as $5.00 via Paypal and begin purchasing keywords for as little as $0.10 (ten cents).  Every keyword starts at $0.10 (ten cents), so by getting in at these beginning stages is huge in order to get a permanent link on that keyword.

Even if you sell your keyword, the link and full advertisement is permanent.  That advertisement is like a Google Adwords advertisement, containing a title, a full description, and URL… and it’s permanent!

People with a larger pocketbook are buying keywords such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, in upwards amounts of $750 and selling them for a profit – but only after they link their site permanently to this keyword.

Another way that Kooday has provided you with an opportunity to make money through keyword ownership is by paid links to your keyword:  For example: If you want to hang on to your keywords, you earn commissions on people who want to link to that keyword, which is 15% of the value – or $15.00 each – which can create huge residuals with hundreds of people linking to your keyword, hence the power of “keyword ownership”!

If you want to join in the Kooday movement click here to get started!

After all, traffic leads to sales, and without traffic we have no sales.

In the past it could be difficult to get traffic without paying out the nose for it.

Enter Web 2.0 – Social Media Websites – and the traffic game just got a whole lot easier…

Social sites provide a simple way to gain more free targeted traffic and increase your sales,
but there are thousands of Web 2.0 sites and knowing which to use can be a daunting task.

You need to use a site that is well established, and that is on track for longevity AND growth…

Squidoo – The Undisputed Web 2.0 King!

Because Squidoo has been around so long and they are committed to quality, the search engines have
given them extremely high search engine ranking.

And since you are building a page ON the Squidoo web site, you automatically get a piggyback ride,
so to speak, in the search engines vs. starting up a new web site of your own!

Squidoo is the ultimate free tool for generating massive business exposure, but in order to really
make it work for you, you need to know how to set up your lens properly, as well as all the secret
tricks to make your Squidoo lens more noticeable, user friendly, and “rank” friendly.

And that’s where this brand new video series comes into play…

Squidoo Lens Genius reveals:

• Two Simple Hours To Squidoo Lens Mastery and  Extreme Monetization
• Quick Setup, Easy Maintenance, And No Cost
• Creation Of Your Lens
• How to Get Started, Set Up And Pull In Traffic As Soon As Tonight
• All Of The Secrets To Gaining A Competitive Advantage On Squidoo
• Simple, “Watch Over My Shoulder” Training
• Makes This Easy For Anyone

Turning Squidoo visitors into cash is as easy as pointing, clicking and submitting!

Go grab your copy now: http://wackycentral.com/SquidooGenius/?e=sherrylynn

Excerpts show up on WordPress through two methods. One, by replacing the template tag the_content() with the_excerpt(). Then the explicit excerpt you have entered in the Administration > Write > Post SubPanel will appear, or the first 55 words of the post’s content. Users can then click on the title to continue reading more as you have enticed them with your summary introduction.

The most commonly used method is to insert a quicktag called more into your post at your desired “cut-off” point.

The quicktags are the little buttons found above the editing window in your Administration > Write > Post SubPanel. They include bold, italic, links, and others, and the famous more. Put your cursor where you want to end the excerpted content of your post and click the more quicktag button. It will insert a code at that point that looks like this:

The rest of the post continues, but when viewed on the non-single/non-permalink web page such as archives, categories, front page, and searches, the post is shown as an excerpt to the more point.

Happy Blogging!
Sherry Lynn

Wow. Scary to think about, isn’t it. What would the ramifications be if you did? And, how long would it take you to recover from that?

- Lost programs.
– Lost documents.
– Lost pictures.
– Lost emails, even.

And, that’s just from a cup of coffee. Heck, that’s an accident.

What about intentional malice? Hackers, viruses, identity theft — eek!

Well, Nicole Dean, is an online business owner like you – and she was worried enough about these issues to write a report to address them.

In it, she covers the following:

The do’s and dont’s of creating and using passwords – so hackers can
never guess or copy them and the no-sweat way to manage all your passwords,
never worry about forgetting, losing or having your passwords stolen.

Why your business needs an emergency manual in case you get sick for an
extended period, or worse. And, what to include in your emergency manual.

Why an external hard drive backup is not enough. And, what to use in addition
to your external drive backup.

What files you should back up – so you know you’ve got all your bases
covered.

YOU CAN ORDER YOUR REPORT HERE

Only $15 for some great information and peace of mind!

Don’t put this aside for later. I, personally have lost all my data and don’t want to see you go through the same thing!

Page Rank checker is a free service to check Google™ page rank instantly via online PR checker or by adding a PageRank checking button to your web pages

I am always checking my PageRanks, but what does it all mean anyway???

I found this interesting article which explains how PageRank works
on Smashing Magazine’s website.

Summary: How Does PageRank Work?

1. PageRank is only one of numerous methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance.
2. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google looks not only at the sheer volume of votes; among 100 other aspects it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. However, these aspects don’t count, when PageRank is calculated.
3. PageRank is based on incoming links, but not just on the number of them – relevance and quality are important (in terms of the PageRank of sites, which link to a given site).
4. PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)). That’s the equation that calculates a page’s PageRank.
5. Not all links weight the same when it comes to PR.
6. If you had a web page with a PR8 and had 1 link on it, the site linked to would get a fair amount of PR value. But, if you had 100 links on that page, each individual link would only get a fraction of the value.
7. Bad incoming links don’t have impact on Page Rank.
8. Ranking popularity considers site age, backlink relevancy and backlink duration. PageRank doesn’t.
9. Content is not taken into account when PageRank is calculated.
10. PageRank does not rank web sites as a whole, but is determined for each page individually.
11. Each inbound link is important to the overall total. Except banned sites, which don’t count.
12. PageRank values don’t range from 0 to 10. PageRank is a floating-point number.
13. Each Page Rank level is progressively harder to reach. PageRank is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale.
14. Google calculates pages PRs permanently, but we see the update once every few months (Google Toolbar).

If you want to know more you can read the whole article here:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/06/05/google-pagerank-what-do-we-really-know-about-it/

I look forward to hearing your comments!

Sherry Lynn

If you sell Kindle Ebooks, make sure you let your potential buyers know this!