After scrapping my jaw off the floor upon reading the aforementioned myth, I knew this bad advice needed to be addressed.

Text content is search engine food. If you are wanting to promote your site through search engines (and if you are online, you should, as search engine promotion is the cheapest and most effective marketing method online) you need to feed them. And the only way to do this is to provide lots of quality content.

Now, please note that word I slipped in there: quality.

Using software to spin 300 versions of one article and pasting the unreadable copies into your website will do more harm than good.

Writing about your baby’s daily diaper changes won’t help much either — unless you’re using your wonderful cloth diapers that you sell on your site.

Writing high quality content that the search engines will index and that other people on the internet will link to is a necessary part of marketing your business online.

Popularity: 43% [?]

see more crazy cat pics

Popularity: 39% [?]

If you’re running Adwords campaigns, you may have noticed the message at the top of your entry pages that says:

Important Change to URL Policy Enforcement
Starting in April, display URLs for new ads will be required to match their destination / landing page URLs, without exception. Please adjust your URLs accordingly when creating new ads.

You can read more about what this means at Perry Marshall’s site. Perry is the co-author of “The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords.” If you want to know anything about Adwords, Perry is the go-to man.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Not only does Alice Seba teach us to be nice in our businesses — she is nice too. I mean, how much nicer can you be than to give away such an awesome product as Internet Marketing Sweetie?!

Internet Marketing Sweetie is (Starting today!) a free course that teaches people, just like you and me, to get ahead in the cutthroat world of online business – all by being nice to people. This isn’t just some flimsy ebook. This course includes audio, transcripts, workbooks and step-by-step instructions to:

• Allow you to help as many people at a time as possible…and increase your profits at the same time.
• Generate plenty of great content that your website visitors want and search engines will send free traffic to.
• Building a responsive list that really likes to buy from you.
• How freebie seekers can actually HELP your business.
• How to build your network to connect with people you’ve been dying to meet.…and of course, there’s more.

Get all the details and sign up for completely free Internet Marketing Sweetie access, go to Michelle Waters Recommends Internet Marketing Sweetie.

Popularity: 40% [?]

It is really freaky to go to Google and discover they’ve turned the lights out.

I thought they’d been hacked until I read the little message:

We’ve turned the lights out. Now it’s your turn - Earth Hour.

Good idea. I’m turning the lights out and going back to bed.

Popularity: 30% [?]

One issue many online physical product sellers face is finding an inexpensive photo editor to crop, correct and optimize their product images.

The main options include:

• GIMP, which is free software, but requires you to download and install on your own computer
• Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro, both acceptable options, but at around $80-90, may still be out of the price range for brand new work at home moms or new business owners that have just spend a ton of money on a website and inventory.

So, when I heard that Adobe had released its free online Photoshop Express today, I thought I’d give it a whirl to see if it would be an acceptable alternative to the cumbersome GIMP or the someone pricey other options.

My first impression was that the pages loaded a bit slow. Now, I’m using Firefox 2+ on a Windows system with high-speed, blazing fast internet. So I don’t think it was me that was slow. I also scanned through the Terms of Service and didn’t see any deal-breakers.

After I signed up and uploaded a 4 MB image quickly and without any hangups. Rotating my image to vertical was as easy as clicking the photo, selecting photo options from a menu that appeared and choosing to rotate right.

And that wasn’t it. Additional photo editing and enhancing options appear when you select a photo and click the edit link button at the bottom.

I was able to easily correct the white balance (by choosing the best balance from among several options), and revert a change by choosing it from a menu.

So far so good.

But then I ran into some problems.

One thing I noticed in Firefox was that my popup blocker kept activating, even though I told it to allow popups from the site. Couldn’t figure out why — didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it though.

From what I’ve read, you can’t upload images from a 12+ megapixel camera.

When I tried to crop a photo, I found that I couldn’t maintain the proportion. I checked their help documents, and so far, they don’t have a whole lot — and none of it covered cropping. I tried a Google search as well, to see if anyone else ran into this problem. So far, not a mention. This, of course, could change over time. But if there is no way to maintain proportion, that’s a big issue for me.

I found nowhere that I could optimize the photos. In other words, Photoshop has a way to save for web and Paint Shop Pro has a similar feature by another name. With these tools, you can reduce the file size of the image while still maintaining the image quality. Express does not appear to have that feature.

I then tried to download my edited image and found out I could only download or link to three sizes: 170×256, 682×1024 or the original. This doesn’t do me any good if I have a photo that is 2048×3072 from my camera and I need a 100×100 thumbnail and a large size of 500×750.

While Photoshop Express may work out wonderfully for your family galler, it just doesn’t give you the control and advanced tools you need for editing and optimizing your product photos.

My recommendation: Slurge on Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro. Or ask your nearest teenaged Geek to install GIMP and teach you how to use it.

Update: During my quest for more information, I found a rather disturbing tidbit regarding the Express Terms of Service. Now, I didn’t see this language in the TOS I agreed to, so perhaps it’s been removed. But I thought it important to report what a CNET editor found:

But there’s a policy pothole on the ramp that almost broke my axle: Adobe’s claims on your publicly shared photos. From the Terms of Use:
Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed. (emphasis mine)

I certainly hope this has been removed. Read the TOS carefully if you want to try it out. And if it’s still there, don’t use it.

Popularity: 27% [?]

I talked to one of my new clients last week about moving her website. Normally, this isn’t a problem. If you’ve bought a web hosting account, you simply submit a helpdesk ticket and ask us to move your entire site over. (And we provide this as a free service!) If you are moving from something like Zen Cart to Shop Kit Plus, you’ll need to integrate your design, manually move your products over and copy/paste your content into the new pages.

And once you’re done with all of that, you change the nameservers on your domain name to point to your new site.

Problems occur though when you are moving from a hosting company that is being uncooperative. And it gets even worse when they have registered your domain name in their name.

This is the situation my client is facing. And to make matters worse, she has no written agreements with the company. All transactions were carried out via phone. Yikes!

My advice to you:

1. If your hosting company or web designer wants to do everything via phone, RUN! If there is a dispute later, you will have little recourse. Unless you have recorded all the conversations… you’ll need to check the legality of that in your state. In California, both parties in the conversation must be aware of the recording. In Oklahoma, only one party in the conversation has to be aware of the recording. That would be you.
2. Make sure you get a contract, read it and sign it. Make sure you keep a copy of it. If you don’t understand the contract, ask a business mentor or lawyer to help you. If you’re uncertain, I would definitely make sure you get legal advice.
3. Always get an invoice. Print out the invoice and keep it. Make sure you get detailed invoice from all your vendors. This way, if there is a dispute later, you will have proof of what you paid for.

My client did not have invoice, email communications or any other documentation. Since her hosting company registered her domain in their name, and she has no proof that she purchased the domain name, she may have lost the domain.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Before we start in on this myth, let’s talk about what a call to action is. Basically, it is the portion of your content that encourages your customers to take action — usually something like buy the product, sign up for the mailing list, subscribe to the blog.

In some ways, the advice to have many calls to action on your site is correct. But the advice is so vague that it can be easily misused and actually work against the success of your site. Just think: If you go to a website wanting to buy a bracelet, but the site is telling you to do 10 other things on every page, you’re going to get confused fast. And what does a confused customer do? Leave.

To effectively use calls to action on your site, you need to follow these tips:

1. Determine what your overall site call to action is. As a physical product seller, your call to action would be buy my product(s).
2. Choose ONE call to action for each page (one exception may be the home page of a site that sells many products and offers lots of information). But other pages should have just one call to action. Tell the customer what they need to know, demonstrate the benefits of your product and then tell them to click the button and buy.
3. Remember, even your policies pages and contact pages need calls to action: Call us for more information, read these policies before requesting a refund, etc.

Keep these three tips in mind and you’ll make your customer’s shopping experience must more pleasant.

Popularity: 23% [?]

When you sign up for a hosting account or website design, make sure you read your contract and the site’s Terms of Service (TOS) very carefully.

And if you find any gems like the following, run far, far away:

1. The company charges you coming and going.

Some companies will charge you high fees to transfer your domain name away from them — way more than you paid to register it through them. Personally, I think this is nuts. When my clients register with me, the domain is in their name and and they are free to transfer it away through any other registrar. All they have to do is initiate the transfer and follow through with the emails approvals required by the new registrar.

2. The company holds your domain hostage

One of my clients is experiencing this. According to her old hosting company’s site:

Domain names purchased by [web design company] and website designs, databases, stores, or programs created by [web design company] are the property of [web design company] until Client has paid all fees including one full year of monthly hosting. (See Domain Names Purchase/Hosting Agreement).

The company registers the domain name in its own name, so the client can’t take it anywhere else until after one year. And then the company provides crappy service — possibly in hopes that you’ll leave so they can either pocket your money, or add your domain name to their parked names that they place ads on.

Now, I agree that if you haven’t paid for something yet, you shouldn’t receive it.

That said, whoever is registering your domain name should charge you for at least one full year, you should pay up front and it should be registered in your name. If your web designer or host does not clearly state that your domain will be registered in your own name, then I strongly recommend you go to a registrar like GoDaddy for your domain name instead.

This brings me to the next domain name scam:

3. The company charges you for 10 years, but only registers the domain for 1.

This is great for the company, especially if you get fed up with their service and leave. With their no refund policy in hand, they keep your 10 years registration fees when you leave — and they don’t have to register the domain for the full amount of time you requested.

How to avoid these scams?

Read the Terms Of Service and any contracts you sign.

Popularity: 32% [?]