The quality of your website backlinks is one of the most important factors to ranking in search engines. Search engines look at links as endorsements. If one website links to you, that’s essentially a “vote” for your website.

If you get a “vote” from a high quality website such as Amazon.com or Apple.com, that’s counted as much more important than getting a link from just any website on the internet.

Without good backlinks, your chances of getting ranked for even semi-competitive keywords are almost zero. With great backlinks and great content, your chances of ranking for competitive keywords are much, much higher. Let’s take a look at the two most important factors to determining a link’s strength: relevance and authority.

Relevance

Getting a link from a website that is related to yours is counted much more highly than a link from a website that is not related to yours because search engines know that is how links are naturally supposed to work. Related businesses refer one another. People make recommendations to people with similar interests. If you suddenly get a bunch of unrelated links, search engines start to get suspicious. In other words, if you run a cooking website, it’s much better to get 50 links from other cooking websites than 200 links from clothing and violin websites.

Authoritative

In addition to relevance, Google also looks at the authority of a website when determining its link power. After all, if link count was all that mattered, anyone could just start 200 new websites and link them all to one site to get them ranked. That’s not how it works. Those websites need to have already built up credibility in Google’s eyes in order for the links to really count.

One way Google measures a site’s authority is through PageRank (PR). PR is a simple way of ranking how many websites have linked to that site. In turn, high PR sites can then link to another site and give them more of a boost than a low PR site.

PR isn’t all that matters, however. The website’s age, the amount of content, the time users stay on the site and how often they come back all come into play. In fact, over the last couple years, Google has significantly downplayed the role of PageRank in their algorithm because so many marketers have started trying to use PR to game the system.

Backlinks: The Bottom Line

The bottom line is this: try to get as many links as you can, from the best sites in your industry. You might not be able to start with the biggest sites, but start with websites that you admire and respect and work your way up to larger sites from there.

Co-registration leads are leads generated from people signing up for email lists and clicking an “I’d also like to learn about …” box. Co-registration leads are an often underutilized, yet highly profitable source of traffic. They often get a bad rap from people who don’t understand the business, but that can work to your advantage.

Here are the benefits of using co-registration leads:

They are Inexpensive

You can buy a lead for 20 cents to 40 cents on the low end or about 80 cents on the high end. Contrast this with AdWords traffic. Say you are paying 25 cents a click and you have a 10 percent opt-in rate. That’s $2.50 per email. It’s true that the quality of co-registration leads is lower than people who opt in specifically to your list. Even so, you can very often get high quality co-registration leads at a fraction of what it will cost from other advertising sources.

Few People Understand Co-Registration

A lot of people think co-registration is spam. Others think they never convert. In fact, a lot of people have tried co-registration and lost money. The reality is that they don’t understand how co-registration works. They don’t understand the difference between positive opt-in and negative opt-in (when they check the box to get on your list versus uncheck it), or how crucial the mailing system is to maintaining a relationship with the lead.

When done properly, co-registration can be incredibly lucrative. When done incorrectly, co-registration is often a money losing proposition. The downside to this is that you will have to spend some time learning the ins and outs before beginning. The upside is that there is far less competition on co-registration than other advertising sources.

They Are Scalable

A lot of high-converting, low-competition advertising sources just don’t scale. For example, MySpace ads might have less competition than Facebook’s, but you just can’t get much traffic with MySpace. Co-registration on the other hand is nearly infinitely scalable. If you find a profitable broad market, you can literally buy hundreds of thousands of leads per month. Getting the first $1,000 with co-registration is often harder than going from $1,000 to $10,000.

They Convert

Finally and most importantly, co-registration leads convert. It doesn’t work quite the way most people think, though. Co-registration leads will generally covert after a few well-written emails; not necessarily right away. The people who try co-registration and can’t get it to work usually aren’t approaching it correctly. They are trying to recoup their money too quickly, aren’t mailing new leads quickly enough, or just have bad copy.

The bottom line is that co-registration leads convert, they are scalable, they are inexpensive, and not a lot of people understand them. There’s a lot of room for mistakes, but there’s also a lot of room for profit. If you take the time to understand how co-registration works, you can make a small fortune from it.

If you become great at telesales, you will have a potentially very lucrative career ahead of you. The ability to generate sales on the telephone is a difficult skill to acquire, but very valuable to many employers once you have developed it. Here are a few quick tips to improving your output:

The Most Crucial Five Seconds

The first five seconds of the phone call are by far the most crucial of the call. In these five seconds, the person on the other end of the telephone line will decide:

* Do I like this person?
* Can this person help me?
* Is he or she looking out for my best interests?
* Am I interested?

Within five seconds, you need to convey that you are positive, believe in your product, and that you can help the person solve a problem. They should feel better simply as a result of talking to you. This is your “hook.” Practice it, refine it, get feedback on it and perfect it.

Rehearse without Sounding Rehearsed

It is crucial that you practice and rehearse when it comes to telesales. Almost every trainer in telesales agrees that using a script increases conversions, though most people just “wing it.”

In order to succeed, it is crucial that you have a practiced pitch that works and that you don’t sound rehearsed, which turns people off immediately.

You should sound natural, competent, helpful and confident about your product, rather than rehearsed and stiff.
Therefore, practice and get it right. Get feedback from the people around you, including your peers and supervisors.

How You Hold Your Body Matters

Does it matter if you are smiling when you pick up the telephone? The experience of many telesales experts all over the world, as well as results from scientific experiments, show that it really makes a huge difference. Changing your body as you are making your calls can make a big difference on how your voice sounds and the impression you make. Any time you pick up the phone, have your back straight and chest out so you sound confident. Smile to convey excitement or just happiness in life, so people enjoy talking to you.

These are a few tips for getting better at telesales quickly. Becoming a top telemarketer doesn’t happen overnight. The best sales people aren’t born; they got there by hard work and practice. It is because they are willing to do what so many people aren’t willing to do that they are well paid.

Twitter, one of the most high-profile social media tools, has the potential to launch your business from obscurity to high visibility. Users often prefer to follow a business rather than join a Facebook page, since it is easier to manage.

Once someone has followed your company, that essentially means that they want to hear more from you and are open to both content and marketing messages.

Here are a few tips to getting more followers and increasing customer loyalty once you have those followers:

What Your Users Want to Hear About

All that truly matters is the quality of your content. To succeed, you need to ask yourself what your users want to hear. For example, followers of a local restaurant chain might be interested in the daily special or in special discounts. On the other hand, followers of online personalities and bloggers might want witty lines on news or quick tips on whatever topic they are writing about. Each market and each customer base has different expectations about what they will receive. Make sure you are tweeting out the kind of content that people want to hear. Do this and followers will stay followers, read your tweets and pass your tweets along to their friends.

The Dialogue versus The Monologue

A lot of businesses make the mistake of “talking at” their customers through Twitter. While this may work for some, it is not nearly as effective as having a two-way conversation with your followers. Ask your followers a question and have them respond. Welcome @replies and respond to direct messages. In short, use Twitter to host a conversation rather than just tweet out one way.

Competitive Spying

To dominate your market, you need to know it well. One of the best ways to know your market is to follow all your competitors on Twitter. Determine how your competitors are using Twitter, whether they are they having more success than you, whether they have more user engagement than you, what kind of promotions they are doing, if they are using contests or coupons, and what kind of “vibe” they have.

Knowing what your competitors are doing gives you a huge advantage. By keeping track of them, you can learn from their successes and avoid their failures. You may even be able to steal some of their followers by participating in their conversations.

It’s basic but powerful: In order to dominate your market, you need to give your users what they truly want, consistently. Aim to be in conversation with your followers rather than just having a one-way monologue. Finally, follow your competitors’ every move and aim to always be two steps ahead.

Link building is the number one most important factor to search engine rankings, yet it is one of the least understood topics. Not all links are treated equally. In fact, many links that webmasters seek out aren’t even counted in Google at all.

If you want to succeed in the search engines, it is crucial that you follow link-building best practices:

Aim for One-Way, High Authority Links from Related Websites

These three factors are the most important factors for determining link quality:

* One way – If the link is reciprocal, Google vastly discount the link.

* High authority – Get links from high authority websites. Getting one link from the New York Times is easily worth more than 10,000 links from brand-new websites. In the past “authority” meant page rank, but today Google takes a lot more than just page rank into account.

* Related – If you have a lot of unrelated sites linking to you, Google will look at your site with suspicion. In natural markets, people link to one another within the same topics and industry. On the other hand, search engine spammers tend to buy links en mass from unrelated websites. Get links from within your industry.

These are the three most important factors for evaluating link quality.

Get a Mix of Link Sources

There are many different websites you can get links from.

* Contextual – This is the best place you can get links from. If your website is mentioned in another website in relevant context, that is viewed very highly in the eyes of Google.

* Static web site links – Getting a link on someone else’s site, especially authority and/or related sites, is viewed highly by Google.

* Blog commenting – Blog commenting used to be an effective way to get ahead in the rankings, but comment spam has gotten commenting downgraded.; however, it can still help your rankings quite a bit.

* Forum postings – Forum postings with a link back to your website in the thread or in a signature can help your rankings as well, especially if the forum is related.

Getting a mix of link sources is the best way to appear organic while receiving a fair volume of inbound links. Don’t just use one technique–se them all.

Anchor Texts and Deep-Linking

Most webmasters link primarily to their home page. If you do that, however, chances are you will miss out on a lot of link-juice opportunities to get sub-pages ranked.

Instead of sending all your links to your home page, link to relevant subpages. Get these ranked for long tail keywords. Your home page will also gain in ranking as a result. Focus on getting back-links to pages deep in your website.

Also, make sure your anchor texts are relevant to the page they are linking to, rather than your home page. Anchor text is extremely important in determining the relevance of the link.

These are some of the more important link-building practices for getting ranked in the search engines. Diversify your link sources, deep link, get the right anchor texts and aim for high authority, related one-way links.