AlpacaConnect

In order to advertise your products to the largest possible audience you will need to know the most useful ways of promoting your web sites. This is a brief description of the most effective advertising methods for online marketers.

Advertising through pay per click is one of the more effective means of advertising. Listing your web site with a pay per click search engines will allow you to start reaching your targeted customers immediately rather than wait for months for search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to spider your web pages. Your advertising dollars are too important to waste time on ineffective means of advertising.

The three top reasons for advertising with pay per click are controlling your rank in pay per click search engines, reaching large numbers of online customers quickly and inexpensively, and the fact that pay per click advertising gets fast results and attracts traffic to your web site quickly.

Search engine optimization refers to the use of certain keywords on your web pages in order to receive high rankings in the major search engines. Each of your web pages will contain content on a particular subject.

There are certain keywords that are searched the most often by internet shoppers looking for information about a particular subject. Regardless of the subject matter of your web pages, finding the right keywords to include in your content will increase your search engine ranking and drive traffic to your web site.

There are several ways to find the most searched for keywords. There are services that provide keywords to internet marketers for a small fee, usually on a monthly basis. You can learn to research keywords on your own although if you are a beginner it may take some time to become familiar with keyword research and be able to do this effectively.

Affiliate marketing programs are another method of increasing traffic to your web site. Webmasters can create affiliate marketing programs that will link their sites to the web sites of others. This enables an online customer to click on your ad from a web site belonging to an affiliate. You will pay the affiliate a small commission for each sale you make that results from the customer's click. Affiliate marketing programs allow you to increase traffic to your site and advertise your products and services through the web sites of other internet marketers. The small commission you pay your affiliates is well worth the increase in traffic and sales you may receive.

Internet marketing is like any other business. If you want to succeed and profit from your efforts, you must effectively advertise your products and/or services. You cannot expect to simply choose the products you will sell, build a web page, and watch the money roll in.

Advertising and web site promotion are critical to the success of your business. Utilizing the most effective means of advertising will greatly improve your chances of succeeding in your home-based business ventures. The most profitable internet marketers take full advantage of the advertising tools available to them.

For the past two New Year Eve celebrations, several alpacas from Alpaca Angels of The Highlands, LLC have gone to meet the public by participating in parades as well as 'walk abouts" in various towns and events. The animals have won the hearts of many New Year celebrants who ask for more information, such as how to get to the farm in the near future. CNN gives coverage to many New Year's Eve events and covered our first major "alpaca concert" in Delray Beach, Florida, in 2007 where thousands of people hummed "Alde Lang Syne" with eight alpacas in the famous tennis stadium of the All-American town. This year, CNN has a "Team Ireport" staff reporter that called me to do an interview, and created two areas for viewers to write in regarding the alpacas' events this year. One is on the blog sight of the "Team Ireport," about A Furry New Year and the other is in the Ireports section of three days ago, called "Annual Alpaca New Year's Eve Walk," which had over 9,000 hits. You too can add to the story there, by creating a screen name when you log in with your email address and password. Of course alpaca people also give the story a FIVE STAR rating...and then write about how well alpacas can behave in public and on the farms. It's a golden opportunity for alpaca owners to log in and share our experiences globally, for a few days at the start of what needs to be a great year for us all. If you will take a few moments to go to cnn.com and find these ireports, likely you'll be glad you did. Have a "Happy New Year" indeed!

Since 1959 the United Nations has designated International years in order to draw attention to major issues and to encourage international action to address concerns which have global importance and ramifications. This year, the UN has named 2009 as it's International Year for Natural Fibers. <!--break-->The goals of the UN are: * raise awareness and stimulate demand for natural fibres; * promote the efficiency and sustainability of the natural fibres industries; * encourage appropriate policy responses from governments to the problems faced by natural fibre industries; * foster an effective and enduring international partnership among the various natural fibres industries. "Since the 1960s, the use of synthetic fibres has increased, and natural fibres have lost a lot of their market share. The main objective of the International Year of Natural Fibres is to raise the profile of these fibres, to emphasise their value to consumers while helping to sustain the incomes of the farmers. Promoting measures to improve the efficiency and sustainability of production is also an important aspect of the Year." - Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations We couldn't be more excited about the possibilities for growth in the U.S. Alpaca Fiber Industry this upcoming year as more and more Alpaca Farms embrace the Fiber side of their businesses. For more information on this International Effort, you can visit their site at...www.naturalfibres2009.org/en/index.html

Becoming involved in the alpaca business can be a life changing experience. It often begins by falling in love, maybe not in the romantic sense, but almost. When people see their first alpaca or maybe just an alpaca image on TV or in a magazine, something clicks. They are intrigued. They begin to inquire, search the internet, travel to a nearby alpaca farm, and slowly, but surely, their life changes.

Soon they are dreaming of a farmhouse in the country or of renovating that unused barn on the five acres behind the house. A young mother with children begins to wonder, can I really become self employed in the alpaca business? An older couple might ask, can this be what we are going to do when we retire? A professional man says to himself, can we really make a living in the alpaca business?

I have been raising alpacas for seventeen years and I think I have some answers to these questions. Alpacas.com is meant to be a resource for people who seek educated answers to the questions above. We offer help with alpaca business plans and farm plans. We help our clients use science and classic genetic breeding theory to increase their profit potential. We teach people how to select superior stock and how to market their production. Hopefully, in the end, people who become involved in the Northwest Alpacas Network will become successful alpaca ranchers.

Alpaca Business Plan

An alpaca business plan should answer the following questions and contain the following elements:

1. Which alpaca breed do you intend to own, huacaya or suri, or both?
2. The identification of your market niche.
3. When do you require income from the herd?
4. How much income does your family require from the enterprise?
5. A breeding plan.
6. A farm expense budget.
7. Will you pay cash or buy on terms?
8. The tax benefits of alpaca ownership.
9. A marketing strategy.

Creating a Farm Plan

Designing a safe, well-organized plan for adding barns, fences, and accessory buildings is crucial to your success in the alpaca business. At Northwest Alpacas we have helped hundreds of people get started right.

We can give you practical advice on selecting the ideal location, the type of fences you will need, the size of gates, which type of pasture to plant, how to build effective shelter, where to place water troughs, how to select hay, layout your barn, protect against predators, and dispose of manure. About the only thing we won't do is scoop the poop. So call or email Fred (fred@alpacas.com) today and find out how we can help you get off on the right foot.

Animal Selection

One of the most critical decisions you will make involves selecting your breeding stock. If you learn nothing else from this article or our website, please learn how to select stock before you spend the money you have budgeted for animal acquisition.

New breeders have a unique opportunity to position themselves at the forefront of the industry by selecting animals that have superior traits. Knowledge of these traits and how to select them is often the difference betweens success and failure in the alpaca business.

For instance most new purchasers come to our ranch knowing what breed and what color of animal they want to select but few are looking at several, even more important issues:

1. What pedigree they would like to have in their purchase
2. To whom is the animal they are buying bred
3. Who will they be bred to in the future
4. To whom the alpacas will their purchase offspring be bred.

The answers to the above questions can be even more important than whether or not the alpacas exhibit good fleece and conformation traits. At Northwest Alpacas, Fred and myself spend a lot of time educating our clients as to what they should look for in their breeding stock. 

Whatever you do, take a little time to educate yourself before you spend your money. Remember you're going to be in the alpaca business for a long time.

Marketing Strategy

At Northwest Alpacas we believe that marketing is one of the most crucial elements necessary for the success of any alpaca breeder. I can tell you with 100% certainty that if you do not let people know that you have alpacas for sale, you will not sell any.

The first step to understanding how to market alpacas is to learn: 1) who buys alpacas in the first place; 2) how buyers find out about alpacas and where they go to buy them; and 3) what sales strategies work in today's marketplace. 

Northwest Alpacas Network

Another question you should ask any breeder that you buy stock from is: what are you going to do to help me after I buy these alpacas from you? At Northwest Alpacas we have an answer to that question. Everyone who buys stock from us becomes part of our network. This means we offer comprehensive after sale resources. 

If you have read this far, I hope we have added value to your alpaca journey. A friend of mine once told me that he had figured out why he loved raising alpacas so much. When I asked why he replied that he thought "God had intended all of us to be 'shepherds.'" Another answer to the riddle of why so many people are deciding to be alpaca farmers might lie in the observation made by a famous medical doctor who developed the highly profitable "Beefmaster" brand of beef. When he was asked why he decided to be a cowboy, he replied "I have known a lot of doctors that wanted to be cowboys, but I have never known a cowboy that wanted to be a doctor."

There are many reasons for engaging in a link campaign. In Google, links are one of the most important factors in determining a sites rank in the search engine results page (SERPs).

Since this is such a crucial factor in Google's algorithm (as well as the other search engines), a link campaign should be part of your search engine marketing efforts.

First, let's define the different types of links that a site can have:

Reciprocal link - this is where two sites exchange links to each other's sites.

One-way (In-Bound) link - where one site links to another site without receiving a link back.

Reciprocal linking is a very time consuming task when done correctly. During this process, a webmaster will scour the Internet looking for relevant sites that he or she can trade links with.

Once they have obtained a list of suitable sites, a personalized email is sent to the respective webmasters and a request for an exchange takes place. A typical letter would read as follows:

Dear Webmaster:

Your name
your email
www

If and when you receive some repsonses, you should add their sites as soon as you can, and send them an email telling them that their link has been added, and include the url where they can see their site.

You will have to routinely check your partners to make sure they are still linking to your site in order to continue the partnership. Most webmasters are honest and will keep you linked, but there are a few rotten apples out there.

In-Bound (One-way) Links are the best type of links if you can get them. It's not all that difficult to do so, but as in anything worth while, there will be an amount of effort involved.

The easiest way to get In bound links to your site is to do directory submissions. There are many great free directories to submit to, and it's worth the time and effort to get listed in as many as you possibly can.

There are also fee-based directories which you submit to, and as your budget allows, you should try to get listed in all directories that are relevant to your site's topic.

The next way to get one-way links to your site is to do a press release. With sites such as prwire, you can submit a press release to them for free, and that will not only get your site exposure, but it will also get you some in-bound links.

If you have the ability to compose articles or columns, there are many sites that can get your site exposure by you allowing them to re-print your content. While some may argue that this procedure may penalize you in the search engines for duplicate content, as long as you have posted your article to your site first, you shouldn't get hit by a duplicate content penalty.

Depending on how many sites you allow for your information to be published wil also create in-bound links to your site. So the question you have to consider is control of your content versus web exposure.

If you have an online business, you should always include your site's url in your email signature. Many people use either Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail which are all web-based systems, so they read the urls contained in the email and thus add to your back-link totals.

One piece of consideration: When you submit your site information to be linked from, make sure your anchor text (the clickable part) is one of the keywords you are trying to get your site ranked for. What you are telling the search engines is that the destination of the url is about whatever the text link was. So, if your text link says "eggs", the search engine would expect that page to be about eggs.