November 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Multiple Revenue Streams

As a small business owner you’re always strapped for time. You want to grow your business but you don’t have the time to take on more clients. Here are some great ways to increase website revenue without even one more client!

Affiliate Programs

My #1 recommendation for everyone who runs a business is to incorporate affiliate programs as a secondary source of income. You can even build a business based solely off of other people’s products!

Creating Info Products

One of the most profitable ways to increase your income is by taking the knowledge you already possess and turning it into an information product. Ebooks, audios and videos can make very profitable info products!

Hard Goods/Dropshipping

Another good income source is through dropshipping actual physical products. There’s more overhead than affiliate products and info products but if you find a good supplier, it may be a good fit.

Ad Publishing

This is one of the easiest methods to making extra cash online. If your website or blog has decent traffic, you could benefit by publishing ads on your site. Google, for example, will then pay you for every click your site generates for them!

Network Marketing

Network marketing, or MLM, is becoming more mainstream as the industry is becoming more legitimized and regulated. There are literally thousands of companies to choose from and one may be in alignment with your business.

Coaching/Consulting

If you’ve been in your business or industry for some time or are naturally a good teacher, you could supplement your income by coaching others. Spend some time mentoring a newbie or up and coming. They’ll love you for it and and you’ll feel amazing being able to help someone in a profound way!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
October 19, 2009 By 1 Comment

Website Content Development

Now that you know what people are searching for, it’s time to write content around those keywords. When you plan out your content, each page should be focused on one keyword – called keyword focused content pages. Then sprinkle a few “long-tail” keyword phrases in your content.

Ok, let’s take the “wilmington nc storage” example from above. I want to build a page that targets the big number which happens to be “wilmington nc storage.” That’s what most people are searching for so that’s going to be our main keyword or keyword phrase. Then I want to take 3-5 supporting keywords and add them to the content.

My keyword focused content page plan may look something like this:

I’ve got my main keyword and 3 supporting keywords for my one page therefore capitalizing on not just the potential traffic of my main keyword but of 4 others as well. Properly optimized, that one page could show up on the first page of Google 2,850 times a month! That’s just ONE page. Now what if you had a hundred or more content pages on your site?

Are you starting to see why content is king?

You may be wondering if there is some magic ratio of keywords and actual content. Short answer is no. Back in the 90’s you could stuff your content full of nothing but keywords and you’d rank at the top. But search engine algorithms are so sophisticated these days that they can smell a spammy site from a mile away.

So when you’re writing, write for the human reader first, the search engine spiders second. Don’t force a keyword to fit where it just reads unnaturally.

In the storage example I’d probably write about 300-500 words with the main keyword showing up 3-4 times including the title, and each supporting keyword just once or twice.

Other places your keyword needs to show up are in the URL, title tag, and the H1 tag in the HTML of your content. Here’s a diagram illustrating how keywords can show up in your content and the other areas outside of the content that I recommend you add your keywords.

Here’s the HTML of that same page so you can actually see where those HTML tags exist.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
October 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing

Pay Per Click or PPC is the paid sector of search engine marketing. This is a great place to start when you have a brand new site or one that you are just beginning to implement SEO strategies on.

PPC advertising is also an excellent way to get search engine traffic quickly because you can create a campaign in 10 minutes and within an hour, you could be receiving traffic from those ads.

Here’s a screenshot to help illustrate where the Paid vs. Organic listings show up.

The way it typically works in a PPC campaign is you bid for a position. Generally the higher up you are, the more you paid for that position. This makes sense since the higher up you are the more visibility your ad gets.

The big three PPC search engines are the same big 3 regular search engines. There are a ton of others in the game but these are where I recommend starting.

Facebook maybe another I would consider trying out. I haven’t personally used them much, but they have some excellent targeting features that make it a very viable option.

When creating your campaign, be as targeted as possible. Bidding on very broad keywords will not only get you untargeted traffic, it will also cost a lot more! Depending on your chosen keywords, you may be paying $0.50 to $1.00 or more PER CLICK. That can add up really fast.

Therefore bidding on “Wilmington, NC” maybe a smart move for a hotel chain in Wilmington for instance, but not so smart for a specialty merchandise store.

Formula: Revenue / Ad Cost = ROI

Let’s say that specialty merchandise store spends $100 on PPC which only brings in 1 customer that nets her $50 in revenue. She’s in the hole by 50% and hasn’t even taken into account the overhead associated with that customer.

The formula here would be: 50 / 100 = 50% ROI

She only got back half of what you put into the campaign.

Now, if you take that same scenario but this time it’s the hotel chain. They have a higher revenue per customer so their ROI would look much different. For this example, we’ll say the hotel nets $250 per customer

This time the formula would be: 250 / 100 = 250% ROI

Hopefully it’s obvious at this point but I’ll say it anyway. For PPC to be a cost effective advertising medium, you must diligently track your costs and you have to know your ROI (Return on Investment).

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
October 19, 2009 By 1 Comment

Keyword Research

Before you start writing your content, it’s a good idea to know what people are searching for. Remember how you search for your business and how others search for your business could be two completely different things. This is because you know the jargon whereas your potential customer my not.

A really good quick way to do some simple keyword research is to use the Google Adwords Tool. This will give you a good representation of how people are searching for your product or service.

Here’s a search I did for “wilmington nc storage.” This shows you what keywords are being searched and how many searches are being made on Google.

Just that one main keyword has produced potentially a dozen keyword phrases (multiple keywords) that you can now write content on.

Think of keywords as fish hooks in the water. The more keywords your site is optimized for, the better chance of getting a bite.

Take a look for a moment at the Advertiser Competition column. This is based on how many people are bidding on those keywords within Google Adwords, which is where you pay for search engine traffic from Google. Learn more about that here.

This does sometimes translate into how competitive the keyword is in the organic (free) search results. The more competitive a keyword, the more work you’re going to have to do to rank for it.

For more advanced keyword research, check out Wordtracker. You can create massive keyword lists, know exactly how many sites are competing for your keywords, plus uncover even more keywords through their research tools.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
October 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

11 Ways to Build Quality Links

Here are 11 legitimate ways to build quality links to your site:

  • Article Marketing – where you write and publish articles to article directories.
  • Directories – does your town have any websites that list local businesses? Also search for directories specifically for your niche; real estate, automotive, plumbing, storage, etc.
  • Press Releases – most press release distributors will allow a link, sometimes with an extra fee, but it’s worth it.
  • Association Sites – Does your Chamber of Commerce post the links of their members’ websites?
  • Social Media – Facebook, Digg, Delicious are all great places your site should be although not all will count towards SEO.
  • Link to Others – gets their attention and they may reciprocate.
  • Make Contact – yep, good old fashion asking. Ask colleagues, associates, family and friends to put your site in their blogroll, please.
  • Blog Comments – Comment on other blogs most allow you to post a link. Again, not all will count towards your SEO but some will and it will get the attention.
  • Forum Posts – Along the same lines as blog comments but your link is included in the signature file of your posts.
  • Guest Posts – See if you can do a guest article for blogs that would benefit from your information.
  • Hub Sites – Create pages on sites like Squidoo, Hubsites.
Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
October 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Link Building 101

A main component of SEO is link building. This is where you get as many websites to link to you as possible. You can use online directories, article marketing, associations you are a member of, get people to write on their blogs about you, etc.

There are many ways to try to do this but it is tough. Ask yourself, “Why would somebody link to my website?” Sometimes people will link to your site if you provide quality content or something of value.

The search engines look at links pointing to your website as a “vote” for your site. So the more votes you have, the more authority it must carry. Like any other SEO method, link building has been tried to be manipulated as well. Search engines are getting smarter all the time, so even if you think you’ve pulled one over on Google, don’t count on it to work for long.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,