What can you do to make your website appeal to international users, as well as potential domestic clients?
The Internet has become the primary source of information for individuals worldwide, and as the number of Internet users increase daily, it has become necessary for webmasters to improve their websites to keep visitors interested.
You can make your website appeal to international users in number of ways; some of which are listed below for your consideration.
Availability
The primary concern of any webmaster is to insure that your website is compatible with all web browsers. Make sure your website passes the HTML, and CSS validation tests.
Make your website appeal to international users who are disabled, or could have a difficult time accessing your site. If you adhere to the web standards, you should have no problem with this.
Provide simple, straight forward website navigation. Don’t get cute with popovers, designer boxes, etc., keep it simple! If you have to stop to figure out where to go; it’s too complicated!
Make sure that your status bars are prominently displayed in all windows.
Page Appearance
Keep your fonts standard. To be safe, use Arial fonts, or Verdana as a second choice.
Make sure that your font color contrasts with your page background. The font color not only affects how quickly a user can read the content of your web page; it can also cause eye strain in the reader, when outlandish color schemes are used.
Contrast between the background and text colors is extremely important. Black text on a white background, is pretty much the standard, for worldwide readability.
When you use color, there should be enough contrast to make the web page readable; and not too much to cause a distraction to the reader.
Use standard link, and mouse hover colors in your hyperlinks. Don’t get fancy with your hyperlink colors, or you could lose clicks from international users.
When using graphics, be frugal. Use just enough graphics to support what you are trying to convey to your users in your content.
Over use of graphics are often the cause of slow loading web pages that turn off visitors.
Make your content specific, brief, and focused. Don’t wast people’s time by being verbose. Get to the point!
Performance
You can make your website appeal to international users by keeping down the bandwidth.
Not everyone internationally has access to fast Internet connections, and when you design your web page for speed, your readers will appreciate your website all the more.
If you divide your web page into several tables, instead of putting the whole page inside one table, your site will load much faster.
Your aim as a web designer, should be to create the fastest possible loading website, for the slowest connection speed.
Make sure that the navigation features are present at all times, regardless of the window size.
Bugs
To avoid having bugs in your system, set up the body of your text with relative font sizes.
There are users like myself, with poor eyesight, that need to adjust the font size through my settings for better readability. The relative recommended value would be either; font-size: 100% or font-size: -1.
Your URL should contain no punctuations or spaces, and should be short. Users should be able to copy and paste a URL without having to wrap it.
Establish redirects to avoid breaking bookmarks and links.
When you make your website appeal to international users by implementing these suggestions; you have a greater probability of attracting, and keeping, international visitors on your website.
Internet marketers who already know about Seth Godin’s social media site Squidoo, should be interested in some useful Squidoo marketing tips that all but guarantee, getting your site to the top of the search engine rankings.
While some of these useful Squidoo marketing tips are commonly practiced in conventional internet marketing; others are 
unique to Squidoo marketing.
All of these Squidoo marketing tips, will help you get the most benefit from your efforts.
- Keyword research is essential in all types of marketing, and Squidoo is no different.
Before you start setting up your “lens”, make sure the keywords, and keyword phrases you have chosen , are competitive in your market niche, and in other Squidoo lenses with the same
- As with Ezine articles, make sure your keyword or keyword phrase is front loaded in your title, or is your title!
The search engines spider your title first, and will index your lens faster with keywords in this position.
In general, Google ranks popular Squidoo lenses higher and faster than conventional
- If you concentrate on making your Squidoo lens popular, in your Squidoo category listing; you can be assured that Google in particular will give your lens a high ranking in it’s search engine.
- A useful Squidoo marketing tip that is sometimes overlooked, is to link to your Squidoo lens from your blog , or from an Ezine article.
Ezine articles get indexed almost immediately, and a link from one of your Ezine articles to your Squidoo lens, serves as a double whammy and will jump your rankings.
- Since content is king, it’s extremely important that everything your publish on the Internet is WELL WRITTEN.
This applies to Ezine articles, Hub Pages, blogs, websites and Squidoo Lenses.
- No one will bother buying anything from you, or even reading your lens, if you publish garbage content.
You will never gain any credibility or authority in your chosen niche until you learn how to write.
So, spend some time tweaking your writing skills!
- Always provide useful, interesting, relevant content in your Squidoo lens, and keep your focus when writing your articles.
- Another Squidoo marketing tip that will funnel traffic to your website and should be taken advantage of, is social bookmarking.
Use whichever tool works best with your particular niche.
I frequently use StumbleUpon, and occasionally Digg. However, there are many others online that also work just as well.
These social bookmarking sites will give your lens a surge of traffic, when used properly.
- Join Squidoo groups that are relevant to your market niche.
When you associate with other lens makers, you can learn from each other to improve your lens’s.
Checking out the lens of the day group, is also helpful. You can always pick up ideas, new techniques, and practical advise on improving your lenses from the best.
- The best Squidoo marketing tips are often found in the Squidoo FAQ and help pages.
All sorts of useful information is freely available there to help you learn how to increase the ranking of your lens, build up your Squidoo reputation, and help you to make money from your lens.
We hope these useful Squidoo marketing tips, help you to create a productive, revenue generating lens.
Making money with the eBay affiliate program is easy, and getting started is even easier.
People using the eBay affiliate program have earned up to $20,000 per month; you can definitely make money with their affiliate program!
EBay has created a step by step educational guide, that will help you become a success with their affiliate 
program. In addition, they make available SEO tools and strategies, to help you make your website more search engine friendly.
Getting started with the eBay affiliate program has never been so easy.
First, go to http://affiliates.ebay.com/, check out the site, research it a bit, and register by clicking on the “API PROGRAM JOIN NOW” button. You will then have to choose which platform you would like to register with.
Each platform has it’s advantages, so choose carefully and click the Join Now button for the platform you decide on.
You’ll then receive an email with your log in information, and instructions on how to get started. You will be asked questions about your business, which eBay uses to optimize the tools they provide, and guide you to success.
When you get your password and log in information, you can get banners, search boxes, and text links at their affiliate site; http://affiliates.ebay.com/tools/.
The eBay affiliate program offers tracking statistics, to help you determine which products perform the best for your campaigns.
The tracking statistics are important for you to tweek the performance of your website.
You can grow and maximize your strategies, with the eBay Affiliate Program, by using the kits, and valuable website tools that they provide for you.
The eBay affiliate program tools and kits they provide, will give you everything you need to help you become a successful affiliate.
