Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Search Engine Optimization
The secret for most search engine formulas is closely guarded but the basic idea is this: deliver results relevant to a surfer’s query. Thus, search engine companies will continue to deliver as their most popular search engine results the most helpful, easy to read, information rich websites that are well-visited and linked to by other relevant sites.
- They do not appear visually on your website’s pages – hidden in the HTML code.
- They are descriptive tags that tells the browser program how to present your site to a visitor.
The title of your home page and other key pages should contain the most searched-upon keywords relating to the topic and customers of your site. Users see this information appear along the top line of the browser window and it is the first thing that many search engines check when registering your site.
These words should also be the most searched upon words and phrases for your site’s specialty. In this case, however, you can usually include up to approximately 26 characters and run them all together, separated just by commas with no spaces. This allows you to fit more words and also makes it as easy as possible for the search engine spiders to read them.
The last meta tag often indexed by search engines is an approximately 200-character field that allows you to write several short, keyword rich sentences describing in plain English what your site and products are about. Again, you should make sure these sentences are full of your best keywords so that the search engines will show this description of your site in search results relating to that topic when searched by customers.
- Site Summary
In addition to cataloging a site’s meta tags, many search engines also scan the first few visible lines of paragraphs of a website’s visible text to get a more in-depth understanding of its content. Consequently, you should write tow or three short sentences to put at the top of your home page that summarize your site’s (or that page’s) offerings. Like the Description meta tag, these sentences should also be full of keywords. The “
These first few lines of copy on your home page are so important that some search engines ignore meta tags entirely and borrow the Site Summary wholesale to display as part of their search results.
Although the degree to which search engines rely on these four fields varies widely, they are so easy to complete that you should spend enough time to be certain that you have optimized the words included in each one. The best words are those that your potential customers are most likely to use when searching for services/products like yours. By taking care to research the most appropriate keywords and include them in your new site’s meta tags and home page site summary, you will have greatly improved your site’s chances of receiving accurate and highly ranked search engine results.
Find Your Competitor’s Keywords
- Go to your competition’s website
- Click on “View” in your IE explorer bar
- Click on “Source”
- Now you can see the HTML of the page – at the top you can usually see the meta tags that they use.
If the competitor is successful, you may want to consider using their keywords.
Quality Content is King
In the end, search engines are trying to rank quality content and typically, word of mouth will spread the news of a quality content website and other sites will begin linking to your site which will increase your search rank. Therefore, create quality content and the rest will follow.
Get Your Site Listed – Now!
It can take weeks, and often months for a new site to be indexed and included in the major search engines, you should put up and submit to the search engines an introductory site with the basic information they require for indexing as soon as you can.
Nail down initial versions of your site’s title, meta description, keywords, and some summary introduction copy, then post a simple if minimalist version of your site and submit it. Update it later if necessary.
Get Registered in the DMOZ
Submitting your URL to DMOZ open directory project (ODP) will ensure that you start showing up in searches across all search engines. Go to DMOZ.org to request inclusion.
Skip search engine optimization services for now, they’re a rip-off. You can optimize on your own with the above tips.
Making Internet Money Part Three
An eBusiness Action Plan
1. Decide on a target market
2. Research and price suppliers for products/services in demand by that target market.
3. Decide on the product or service to be offered.
4. Investigate production, fulfillment, or other issues specific to your products.
5. Work out roles, obligations and agreements with partners or staff.
6. Brainstorm company names and URLs.
7. Research and register URLs appropriate to your new company’s activity or products.
8. Set up company e-mail accounts for yourself, plus separate e-mail accounts for customer service and any partners or staff.
9. Create or commission a logo and graphics to use when customizing your website template.
10. Select an entity and follow through on all the rudimentary steps of forming a business - i.e. open a business checking account, get a business license, etc. (see how to start a business on this blog.)
11. Diagram the website for the business on paper.
12. Apply for a credit card merchant account, if appropriate.
13. Write the copy for each page of your new site; prepare your copy using Microsoft Word so it will be ready for easy cutting and pasting into the website template.
14. Build out your website using a design template.
15. Create a privacy policy.
16. Build out an online store to showcase products/services for sale.
17. Develop an inexpensive plan to test your new business online.
18. Set up an account with an e-mail marketing list-management service.
19. Create banner ads for use on Microsoft’s Banner Network or elsewhere.
20. Have friends review and test your website online store.
21. “Soft launch” the site to the public to do free testing and receive feedback.
22. Start marketing.
The Five Basic Pages of a Web Site
- Home Page
- Products or Services Page
- Store or Online Shopping Pages
- “About the company” Pages
- Contact or customer service Pages
The Footer should contain copyright, ownership contact and legal information. E.g. – MySite.com – All Rights Reserved, Click Here to Contact Us
Email Marketing
Collect e-mail addresses early and often. Offer up incentives and prizes to your customers in return for an e-mail address. You can use companies such as Constant Contact to manage, create and send your e-mail marketing campaigns for a low price. They will give you the code as well to put an e-mail capture on your website, a “sign-up for our newsletter textbox.” This is a very cost-effective way to stay in touch with your customers and market to them.
Most e-mail list companies charge by the size of your list not on how many e-mails you send so, you can compare companies based on this rate. Constant Contact is one such company.
Example of a Successful Campaign
Two types of newsletters: a monthly information letter designed to educate your audience and not push your products and two, a weekly sales edition that pushes the products.
Choosing a third party solution such as Constant Contact will provide you with more information through their reporting tools and will reduce your bounce back rate since it your mail is coming from a trusted source versus going it alone through a solution such as Microsoft Outlook.
Pay Per Click Keyword Advertising
You can use a service such as Google Ad words to create a small ad that will appear in search results based on keywords you select. For example, if you have a page based on dividend stocks, you can take out an add referencing key words such as dividends and stocks. When an individual searches on dividends, your add could “potentially” pop up next to an organic search, thus a qualified lead. Now, you only have to pay if they click through your ad and if you use Ad words, you set your budget. So, your hope would be that they click through and purchase something since you are paying for the click.
Associate Programs
Check out Amazon. Join their associate program and you can load your site down with widgets chock full items for sale at Amazon. You get paid a commission of course if someone clicks through your Amazon link and purchases an item.
Some Worthwhile Sites
CafePress.com
CommissionJunction.com
ConstantContact.com
CraigsList.org
DrudgeReport.com
eBay.com
Fark.com
GoDaddy.com
Google.com
InternetMillionaireSecrets.com
Payloadz.com
ScoobyMods.com
SweaterBabe.com
Making Internet Money Part Two
Steps to Starting an e-Business
1) Domain name selection
2) Choosing a website hosting company
3) Website design and construction
4) Copywriting
5) Optimizing
6) Marketing
7) Operations
Domain Name Rules:
1) Match your business name as closely as possible
2) Make it short, easy to remember and easy to remember
3) Avoid hyphens and underscores in the name if possible
4) If you have to, use .net or .org and if you can, go ahead and register these as well. Example, your URL is bigblimp.com, go ahead and register bigblimp.net and bigblimp.org.
GoDaddy.com
This is the place to go for domain name searches, registration, domain name administration tools, domain forwarding, e-mail accounts and locking. Domain name registration costs about $10 a pop nowadays
Hosting
Basic website hosting costs about $3.95 a month or less. The host is the spot that “hosts” your web page files and serves them up.
e-Commerce Shopping Carts
Shopping Carts
“A website “shopping cart” is a piece of software that mimics the use of a shopping cart in the real world. In other words, it is software that allows the online shopper to choose and hold items for purchase until she is ready to check out and complete the purchase process by making payment.” - Fox, Internet Riches
The best e-commerce shopping carts:
1) Are easy for the shopper to use
2) Are easy for you to install on your website
3) Offer easy visibility of the cart’s contents
4) Make it easy for the customer to add/subtract goods
5) Display the current total cost of the items in the cart (ideally including sales tax and shipping costs, if any)
Payment Processors
This is the middle man between the customer’s credit card company and your merchant account. It checks to see if a customer’s credit card is legit before allowing a purchase to continue.
Merchant Accounts
This is the middle man between your payment processor and you collecting payment from the customer’s credit card company. In a lot of cases the payment processor and merchant account are one and the same and indistinguishable. But, process-wise, the merchant account receives the okay from the payment processor and then reaches out to collect payment from the customer’s credit card company. This is your merchant account.
Paypal
This is a payment processor and probably the biggest. These guys allow the ability to accept credit card transactions without a traditional merchant account. Initially they started as a way for customers to send and receive money to one another directly from their bank accounts, eliminating the need for credit card transaction-processing capabilities. They have grown to include credit card processing as well. Of course, there is a small fee but by using this service, you can accept online payments by directly debiting the consumer’s PayPal account, checking account or credit card.
Your Shopping Cart:
Paypal offers a simple shopping cart that works very well with its own payment system. It is easily installed to your website with some HTML.
Yahoo also offers a shopping cart product.
Why Ship When You Can e-Mail
Do you have a book or a song that you want to sell? Don’t ship it, send it as a digital download. This will save you all of the hassle and the overhead that comes along with traditional snail mail shipping.
There is a company …
That specializes in digital downloads from Word files to PDFs to MP3s - Payloadz. You can upload your files, and install the basic shopping cart buttons to your website and away you go. You can offer your digital goods for sale securely without having to manually send each customer file purchased and manually process the transaction. Payloadz integrates all of these functions into one helpful service that offers free trials and then starts at $15 a month.
eBay
You know the story … they offer auctions, fixed price auctions, multiple item auctions and stores. ‘Nuff said.
Craig’s List
Need some extra income? Go to the gigs section on Craig’s List to find tons of online gigs such as Writing Gigs, Creative Gigs and Labor Gigs.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Making Internet Money, Part One
The chief thing about money on the web is to leverage as much of the passive sources that you can. You can set up a site nowadays in a matter of hours - the real question, income-wise becomes, "how can I passively profit off of this site."
If you set up a blog on blogger.com, you already have some ready-made options available to you. You can add google adsense to your blog and get paid on a per click basis. For more info, go to http://www.google.com/intl/en/ads/http://www.google.com/intl/en/ads/. You can also sign up for Amazon's associate program and bog down your site or blog with their numerous widgets.
One gentleman, "livingoffdividends.blogspot.com", uses Adsense, Linkworth and Amazon among a list of other passive income web providers.
This is his break-down of revenue generated for a recent month:
Adsense: $339.28
Linkworth: $456.70
TLA: $103.61
Kontera: $62.07
Direct Ads: $330
Prosper Referrals: $175
Amazon: $117.82
Domain Embarking: $60.82
Total Online Income: $1645.30
The key thing, once you get a decent infrastructure set-up, is to spend some money on ads to drive traffic to your site or blog, so I highly recommend checking out Google's AdWords at to get started. Of course, it is always a learning experience so it is best to just jump right in.
Case Study - TrafficMatt.com
What they do: Discuss products they like and provides product information.
Why so special: they carry no inventory but simply focuses on providing helpful information on complex products such as credit card accounts, auto vehicle reports, etc.
Each product's advertiser offers an affiliate program and pay a commision on each product sold through the site.
The great thing about affiliate programs is that the affiliate doesn't have to invest in inventory. Amazon.com offers such a program they call their associate program. The creator of the site generates over $100,000 a year by writing reviews of the products he chooses to focus on, offering online links to purchase them through affiliate ads from Commission Junction and promoting his link-filled sites primarily through pay-per-click advertising.
Another success story: Fark.com posts links to humorous sites and gets paid for advertising. They also charge a $5 a month subscription to for people who want access to the links early.
CafePress.com - want to make your own t-shirt? Go to Cafe Press. Here you can personalize or "logo-ize" your own item from t-shirts to coffee mugs, etc. They offer free online storefronts and completely outsourced manufacturing, fulfillment and cusomter service of logo-branded apparel and promotional items for your business.
Use CafePress to:
1) Launch your own line of clothing or other merchandise.
2) Test out your product line or e-business to see if demand is there.
3) Start a side business that can add additional revenue to your existing website business
or current job.
4) Launch a promotinal clothing or merchandise line to promote an existing real-world business, too!
Niche, online communities also offer up lucrative oportunities. An on-line, niche community is a gathering of members around a particular interest or subject. For example MySpace Music.
How to Profit from an Online Community
1) Id a target group with shared offline interests.
2) Provide them a place to meet and interact online.
3) Offer logo-branded merchandise that they can purchase and wear to show their affiliation.
4) Develop enough exclusive content that you can charge a monthly subscription fee for access to the community.
The Icicle Business Model
Your Interests and Ideas, Customers in the Target Market, In Demand Products, Services or Information, Competitive Advantage, Leverage, = Your Business Model.
Example
If you have an interest in Computers you could narrow it down to a Target Market of Computer Programmers and further narrow that market to Web Developers in C#. Your competitive advantage could be your passion and interest in computer programming. You could then leverage the internet by using online research to quickly find information useful to your target market. You could have a website to detail the information. You could publish a blog to promote the site and generate ad revenue from the site.
Thus, the business model would be Publishing of C# Web Development information to a world-wide audience, paid for by advertising and referral links to vendors.
Google offers free information about the most popular current searches on their site called 'Zeitgeist."
Google AdWords - create your own google search engine ads, select your budget and your keywords that folks would search on and see your ad. You don't pay unless you get clicked and you set your own budget so you will not go over what you want to spend.
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