Many people are terrific writers, but still struggle with how to get started writing articles for profit. As a budding writer, you will likely have to contribute some free writing projects in an effort to get your name noticed. As time progresses and your resume becomes more defined, you will be able to find paid writing jobs without a problem.

Writers not only wonder how to get started writing articles, but also where to submit their completed work. There are plenty of opportunities for talented individuals who have a knack for words, including newspaper reporting, magazine features, website content, press release and newsletter content, etc. If someone were to ask an accomplished writer how to get started writing articles, they would almost always reply by recommending patience, perseverance and promotion. When you decide to become a writer, you will also become a marketing specialist. You will now be in the position of having to sell your work to editors and this can be a very challenging task, but very much worth the extra push.

The best advice on how to get started writing articles would include the recommendation of having a good resume. If you cannot write your own resume, editors will wonder how you will be able to write for them. So, first and foremost, perfect the resume, polish it and make sure that it is without flaw. This means no errors in spelling, punctuation, etc. With that being said, keep in mind that nobody is perfect, so if you notice a mistake after your resume has been submitted, don’t spend too much time worrying about the error. Simply correct the problem and move on to the next opportunity. Truth be told, if your resume looks great, an editor will not disregard it just because you misspell one word or have a punctuation out of place. The next step in how to get started writing articles will be to create a writing sample. If you have been published previously, this will work to your advantage because you can use this as not only a sample of your work, but lend to the popularity of your writing as well. If you have never been published, then write the best article that you can on a subject that is close to your heart.

Still wondering how to get started writing articles? The best way is to just start writing and see where it takes you. Everyone from editors to webmasters are in constant need of content for their publications and websites, so there is no shortage in the writing market. Always keep your expectations in check and don’t expect to get rich overnight. Like any career, it will take time to build and experience is a must. The more you have written, the more you will get the chance to write.

1)      Smart 404

A 404 error occurs when someone visits a page on your site that no longer exists, in such circumstances a generic error page is displayed to the visitor. This page, under normal circumstances, does not match the design of the site, it does not give the user much information and it does not look professional. Smart 404 solves all of these problems by allowing you to configure a 440 page that fits with the site design , provides the user with information and generally looks at lot more professional than the generic 404 error page

2)      Social Bookmarks

The Social Bookmarks plugin gives your visitors the ability to bookmark your site on a range of social bookmark sites without ever leaving your site. This useful functionality can help build long term traffic as these bookmarks may be followed by other social bookmark site users (the links are also good for search engine ranking). Highly configurable and produces nice graphic output

3)      Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools automatically post excerpts of your blog posts to your twitter page (and your twitter tweets to your blog page if you so desire). Another fantastic way to build traffic and links to your site plus once it is configured it is a set and forget utility that just works in the background without any user intervention.

4)      Twitter Tools –Bit.ly urls

An extension of the Twitter Tools plugin that adds the ability to post short URLs in the output of the twitter tools plugin. This is important as twitter only allows 140 characters per post so you do not want to use up the majority of these characters with a full domain name rather than the content of your blog post.

5)      Wordbook

Works in a very similar way to the Twitter Tools described earlier except it post s to your Facebook pages. Another great way to build traffic and backlinks and all done automatically behind the scenes once it has been configured.

6)      WordPress Mobile Pack

This plugin allows users who are accessing your WordPress site via a mobile site switch to a site design / layout that is optimised for such devices. It is more than just a plugin it is also a site layout. Useful for this blogs / sites that may have an audience that uses mobile devices extensively (and lets face it as technology advances this may be everyone !)

7)  WP Super Popup

Some people may see this plugin as a bad thing as it generates popup messages for your site (it creates these popups as layer within the existing site design rather than separate windows that a popup killer would terminate). It is highly configurable and provides a really slick way of delivering popups if you decide that you want them on your site.

Below are the top five ways to market your business on the internet. The ideas listed are not only inexpensive but are highly effective as well. However, before you even consider using one of these strategies, there are two things you must first do.

The first is to write a formal marketing plan. If you’re getting close to opening your business, a marketing plan should already be done as part of your company’s business plan. However, it’s true that many who start online businesses fail to write a business plan. If this is the case, just be sure to at least get your marketing plan formalized before you start doing business. Getting your marketing plan thought through and documented is the minimum you should do for your business. When writing your marketing plan, consider the who, what, when, and how you will do your selling and get your brand in front of your customer. Then decide which of the following strategies you will implement in that plan and explain how you plan to carry out those strategies.

The other thing you need to consider is search engine optimization. It is essential to learn how to optimize your website so it will eventually get ranked in the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The sooner you get started with optimizing your site, the faster it will get ranked. Until some of your pages are ranked in the search engines, your traffic will remain minimal. Consider investing in a book, ebook, ecourse, or program of some sort to learn how to optimize your site so you can use the information as you are building it and adding your content. Be sure you’re learning the most recent information because the rules change frequently.

Now on to the Top 5 Ways to Market Your Online Business.

1. Find Your Niche. Imagine trying to sell your product or service to the entire world. Consider the marketing budgets of companies like McDonalds, these are companies that are trying to appeal to everyone. Selling your product or service to a small but focused group of people will allow you the luxury of advertising to a smaller but more interested group of people. Since they are more interested, a higher percentage of the group will buy but you will have spent less money pursuing the smaller group. Once you are successful selling to one niche, if your product or service is appealing to another niche, you can create another website and repeat your success using the same strategies you used on the first website.

2. Link Exchanges. Exchanging links with other websites that have complimentary products or services will not only give you direct traffic from the link but it will also help you with your pursuit to get ranked in the search engines. At the time of this writing, Google is the most widely used search engine, and it’s widely known that they consider the number of links pointing to your website as part of the determination where to rank your website.

3. Write Articles. Writing articles with information that is interesting and useful for your niche market will help you gain traffic to your site. When writing an article, include a resource box at the end of the article that includes information about the author (that’s you) and a link to your website. Then distribute the article to article directories for other website owners to use on their site or in their newsletters and ezines. This does two things, you gain traffic when someone sees your article on another website and clicks your link and you get a link that points back to your site for the search engines to use to rank your site higher.

4. Using a Signature Line in Online Forums. This is a strategy that could be quite time consuming so don’t let it take up huge amounts of your time, however it is quite effective in drawing traffic to your website. Join forums and messageboards that are useful to your niche market and then become part of the community. When you make a post, be sure it’s useful and relevant to the information that is being discussed, then at the bottom of your post, sign-off with your name and little blurb about your company with a link to your website. These are often referred to as “sig lines”. Be sure to read the forum’s guidelines to be sure you’re using the proper etiquette in the forum and to be sure signature lines are allowed. If they are not allowed, do not use this strategy in that forum as it could cause you to be banned from that forum.

5. Start A Newsletter. Having a newsletter is one of the best ways to market to your customers and potential customers. You will need to have a service that will host your list and allow you to send your newsletter. Then you put a sign-up box on your website and your visitors will sign-up. Periodically, you decide how often, you send those who have signed up an email with information that is relevant to your niche. This information could be general info or it could be specifically about your product. To get your visitors to sign-up you can offer a special report, e-course, ebook or anything that would entice them to give you their email address. When you choose the service that will host your email list, be sure they do a double opt-in confirmation of those who subscribe, it’s now the law.

In this article we covered the top five ways to market your website and a couple of things you need to do before you ever even start. Now it’s time to get out there and implement some of these strategies.

Keyword tools comprise such tools as:-

1)      Keyword Density Checker – this tool extracts lists of keywords or phrases from a website and calculates how often they occur – this is known as keyword density. This is a vital characteristic to understand as it has a high impact on how your site ranks in the search engines. Also very useful to use to analyze your competitor’s websites to find out how they managing to get high rankings i.e. what words and phrases are they using and at what density. It is also useful to check that your keyword density is not too high as many search engines will penalize this (it is known as keyword stuffing or keyword spamming).

2)      Keyword Extractors – as the name suggests this tool extracts lists of keywords from a website in a form that is easily exportable. This tool is useful for generating ideas around which keywords or phrases you should choose to optimize for – particularly if it is used to extract lists of keywords from a high ranking but competing site.

3)      Keyword Rich Domain Finder – this tool finds websites that have high keyword densities for the chosen keywords or phrases.  The list of sites found by this tool can be an invaluable source of data for your keyword research and also a very useful piece of competitor analysis.

4)      Keyword suggestion generator – another great tool for when you are generating your lists of keywords and phrases on which to base your pages or site. The Keyword suggestion generator tool will normally produce lists of keywords or phrases that are related to your seed keyword, this is usually in easily exportable format so it can easily be moved into other tools for further analysis.

5)      Search engine keyword position / rank checker – this tool usually comes in three different varieties, these varieties are :-

a)      Multiple Keyword Search Engine Position Checker Tool – this tool will check the ranking of a site for multiple chosen keywords. It is useful for checking your ranking for the keywords you are trying to optimize for in order to determine if your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts are paying off.

b)      Multiple Website Search Engine Position Checker Tool – this tool will check the ranking of a list of multiple websites for a chosen keyword or phrase. A useful tool to check how you are ranking compared to other sites in your chosen area.

c)       Search Engine Rank checker – checks the ranking of a website for a chosen keyword across multiple search engines. A useful tool to see if your SEO efforts are working on more than one search engine.

As can bee seen from the above descriptions of the various keyword tools they are invaluable for any serious SEO campaign and no serious web marketer should be without access to them.

So you have created your new website (or maybe just a new page on your existing website) and you are ready to share it with the world. It looks good, it seems to load ok when you check it, it does the job you intended it did when you first thought but is the HTML valid?.

The first response that may spring to mind when asked this question is – why should I care aboutHTML validation?, hopefully the reasons below will provide a compelling answers to this question (and hopefully get you to validate your html !) :

• Search engine optimisation – if your pages include html errors this may make it difficult for spiders to crawl your site, the knock on effect of this may be that your site does not get indexed as quickly or as completely as you would like. As, for most people, the majority of traffic comes from the search engines this is obviously a very bad thing.
• Eradicate broken links – Broken links can not only be a deterrent to your visitors ( both in terms of looking unprofessional also preventing them accessing what they want to access) but also impair your indexing in the search engines – if the links are broken or incorrect then a spider will not be able to follow them.
• Faster / Better page loads – if a page contains errors then it may not load as quickly or completely as an error free page. It also may not fare as well in terms of cross browser compatibility. Any issues that affect site speed must be taken seriously as they will affect user perception of the site (and therefore may affect user retention, likelihood of purchases etc)
• Perception of quality – if you have undergone a html validation process then you should not have errors or incorrect presentation on your page – two things that can seriously damage the perception of your site.
• Backwards compatibility – Properly written HTML is more likely to be compatible with future versions of web browsers as and when they are released (code that not had any html validation is extremely unlikely to have such compatibility)
• Compliance with Standards – it is becoming increasingly important for sites to be compliant with the various web access / presentation standards – valid html will help achieve this.
• WYSIWYG bloating – many, but not all, WYSIWYG editors can introduce extra code into web pages, validation should help identify and remove extra, unrequired code from pages.
• Reduce effort – an html validator will help to spot errors early on hence eradicate them quickly and efficiently. They should also help to pinpoint exactly where the error lies within the html code.

So if you accept the fact that html validation is a positive thing to do then what is the best way of carrying out the validation?- I would recommend the use of a html validator online – by using online html validation you avoid the need to download tools to your pc, they are usually free and the responsibility for keeping them up to date lies with someone else.