Business Alone

Online business owners need to become familiar with the concept of "keyword research."

I will explain, in a very basic way, what keywords are, why they are so important, and how they are found and used.

Very simply, keywords are the words you use on your web site and in your marketing to let your prospects know exactly what your business is all about.

They are the words that succinctly "target" your audience.

Keywords are used so that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN will understand what your business is all about so they can send you customers that are looking for what you have to offer.

From your prospect's point of view, keywords are the short phrases that they will enter into web searches in order to find what they are searching for.

Online business owners need to become familiar with the concept of "keyword research" because it will allow your business to open its doors to the specifically targeted customers that will buy what you offer.

The concept of "keywords" is a detailed and somewhat technical field, but it is one of the most important parts of every online business owner's strategy to marketing successfully.

In our previous discussion we talked about what keywords are, why they are important, and how they are found. Let's dig a little deeper now and show you how to research the keywords and phrases that are most relevant to your business.

Let's spend some time and talk about how to develop your keyword strategy.

I recently came across some information that should be of interest to all solo Internet business owners.

It was entitled: "Search Engine Marketing: Search Users and Usage"

It was authored by David Hallerman, Senior Analyst at eMarketer. I would encourage you to get the whole report and study it. I hope the link is still live when you read this. Here it is:

http://www.emarketer.com/Products/Products.aspx

I was especially intrigued with the satisfaction survey that was offered as it gives you a feel for how users or consumers view the major search engines as well as the field of Internet marketing and advertising.

You should be able to gain your own "take aways" from what the articles describes.

I recently came across an article that gave some specific proven advice about launching a new web site. The steps explained were simple and straightforward. I don't remember where I saw the article, but I did make a copy and thought I would summarize it here for you.

The title of the article was: "Launching your Web Site the SEO Way" and it was authored by Paul Fleming.

First of all, you web site needs to be SEO friendly - no flash, no frames, judicious use of images and graphics.

One of the most important things you can do for a new site is to begin building the incoming links to your site from outside, trusted sources. This process takes time and will be something you need to pay attention to always.

Try to get links from sites with a page rank above 3. Here is a directory that offers good links, both paid and free. It's a good place to start.

Other candidates are Wikipedia (Page Rank of 9), Yahoo! (Page Rank of 10), Superpages.com (Page Rank of 8) and Dmoz.org (Page Rank of 9). It may take some time (especially with DMOZ), but a link from any of these sites would be wonderful.

As a solo Internet home business owner you are most likely the webmaster of your own web site.

Unless you have turned that function over to someone else (like your girl friend, your 2nd cousin "Harry," or the six year old next door), you will be in charge of optimizing your site for key words, meta tags, and other little HTML goodies that tell the search engines what your site is all about.

Many of us are in business to make money (imagine that . . .) and we certainly don't want to spend time fiddling around with such trivial matters as web site coding and search engine optimization. Right?

In a previous post, we talked about what meta tags are whether they're important to the search engines. We're going to continue that discussion here and add a few other thoughts.

As the Internet has become more crowded with e-commerce sites, the race to attract traffic through the free search engines has greatly intensified.

In fact, today it's all-out war when it comes to competing for top billing: the rush to grab the very highest search engine rankings for competitive key words that drive tons of traffic to the winners.

Linking strategies for commercial web sites seem to be grabbing a lot of attention these days from marketing experts that claim in-bound links are critical to the search engine rankings.

There is a lot of on-going debate about just how important your links are to top rankings. I'm sure each of the top search engines has its own view of the subject. No doubt they give varying importance to this criterion.

Some claim also that the "page rank" (Google) or the importance of the site linking to your site also affects your search engine position.

But there are other reasons why you need links.

To tell you the truth, I'm having a hard time coming up with any reasons why you shouldn't absolutely consider having a forum at your site.

In the early Internet days folks would chat back and forth via email only. Some sites placed comment forms in strategic places around the site to encourage visitor input, but that communication was pretty much one way.

If the site owner wanted to answer a comment, it was back to the email station to shoot off a reply.

I recently viewed a video clip produced by John Reese that showed his amazing VRE strategy that added over $500,000 to his business the first year it was implemented (beginning in February 2005.) You can view the video for yourself right here. (Excuse me if this link is no longer working - John has changed his business model several times in the past couple of years and the link may be down by now.)

John says he spent about 120 hours initially setting up this project which includes a network of small web sites that carry Google Adsense ads along with specifically targeted content related to high-paying keyword niches.

John is the same fellow that made some huge waves in the Internet marketing circles when he sold over $1 million of his Traffic Secrets course in a 24-hour period.

The premier search engine Google has come up with several programs that may be of interest to the solo small business owner. But there seems to be some matter of conflicting opinion about whether a web site owner should do anything to send his traffic away to someone else.

Here's the deal: Google allows web site owners to advertise products and services on their web site in exchange for a small referral fee each time a viewer clicks on one of the Google ads.

This is not an affiliate program since Google pays for each click rather than for a product that is actually purchased. In a sense, the web site owner is sharing in a PPC (pay per click) program. Google serves the ads and keeps track of the clicks. The web site owner puts Google's html code on his pages and provides relevant content for Google to match to its advertisers.

If you are a solo business operator and choose to increase the revenue generated at your web site, you have the option of employing Google Adsense advertising. I believe Yahoo and MSN also (or will soon) offer similar programs that allow the web owner to monetize his content.

There are several factors that determine how much revenue a web owner can generate for each of the particular content pages on his site that serve Adsense advertising.

First, the traffic to a site is important as most Internet advertising is, in part at lease, a numbers game. Your viewers will only click on an Adsense ad a certain proportion of the time.

Let's use the example of 1 click every 200 visitors. Given that type of click-through rate, a site with 200 visitors/page/day will generate 1/10 the income that a site with 2,000 visitors/page/day will get, all other things being equal.

I'm no expert on the subject because I've only been blogging a short time now (since February 2006 on a blog different than Business Alone).

However, I have been a writer for quite some time and many of the same rules apply to blogging as well.

I have taken the time to do some research on the subject.

Specifically I have been reading about "How to Blog" and trying to follow the instructions of some who have been successful bloggers for quite some time now.

I've also spent a fair amount of time visiting popular blogs, watching what other authors are doing, and trying to follow their lead by seeing and incorporating their techniques into my own blog.

We've been discussing how to write a blog. I've given six suggestions so far that will help you to be successful and attractive to the readers in your niche.

7. As much as possible, include a title that grabs your reader's attention and forces him to stop and read more.

Some have suggested that the title is 80% responsible for the post being read. Some just skim through titles and short blog excerpts to determine if they want to take the time to read the whole post.

If your title is weak or sounds boring, there is a very good chance the viewer will skip on by to something else. Try to fit key words from your niche into the title if you can.

Before we get to today's post, I want to wish each of our readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Take some time off today and enjoy the holiday with your family - I'm going to do just that since I wrote this post yesterday!

When the Internet was new and online business owners were jumping on the ship right and left, there was often the feeling that all a business owner needed to do to have a business was put up a web site, add a product or two, and the sales would begin to flow.

Yes, I'll remind you once again of that worn out phrase that everyone else quotes to describe this erroneous thinking: "if you build it, they will come."

Online business owners now understand that phrase is a lie.

I did a little experiment myself that proved the point to me in very real terms. Two years ago I set up a little web site with it's own domain name, some content, keywords, etc.

I asked visitors to register at the web site (for free) to get my newsletter with lots of great benefits. I even offered a bonus worth a legitimate $300 merely for signing up and there were no other strings attached.

Regardless of the size of your marketing budget, there are some business principles that should guide what you do, when you do it, and how you bring together the various elements of your business marketing.

The tendency for many new small businesses is simply to strike out and begin spreading the word about your product or service in a random hodge-podge manner, jumping from this to that depending upon where you think you'll get the most bang for your effort.

Your marketing "plan" has no real thinking behind it . . . you just figure the best you can do is to spread the word as quickly as you can to as many sources as you can and hope for the best.

Now that game plan certainly beats doing no marketing at all, but it lacks the leveraging power of a unified and comprehensive approach that ties all your different marketing efforts together and cements your brand in the minds of your customers.

Before we get to today's post, let's take a minute to remember the victims of the September 11th tradgedy of 2001. It's hard to believe that it's been six years since we endured that nightmare.

Let's remember what has made our country strong and each do our individual part to continue that heritage of courage, hard work, and a never say die attitude - each an important trait for small business owners.

Okay, we'll move on.

I've been thinking a lot about Internet real estate and branding, and whether they are important undertakings of solo business. I've been asking myself questions like:

- Is it worth the effort and expense for a small business owner to try to establish a brand of some kind for his business?

- In the Internet world of big corporations, net real estate has increasing value. But does that same concept apply to small businesses as well?

- Is there a way for a solo business owner to add value to his property beyond the value of the information he publishes at his web site?

Blogs, like most every other type of Internet web site, gain value, grow, and even thrive when they are heavily viewed.

The more traffic a blog receives, the greater the chances for continued relevance and possible revenue generation.

Of course, money and income don't drive most blogs.

Typically bloggers are content with having their own soapbox to publish their opinions and feelings to the world (or at least those who care to visit.)

Bloggers are also finding that most search engines seem to like blogs. Why?

I have seen a smattering of Internet marketers voicing loud and sometimes passionate opinions that blogs are destroying the Internet. Why?

These blog naysayers suggest that blogs are too ubiquitous, they give every Tom, Dick, and Sally a public platform on which they push a certain agenda, try to sell in a saturated market, and criticize and condemn products they don't like even when their reasons are suspect.

One fellow complained that blogs get into the search results too easily and because of the sheer numbers of blogs (he said "tens of millions") the results are not returning what viewers are looking for.

Grab any piece of junk mail and take a quick look at it.

You will probably notice one of two things: either the copywriter hits you right between the eyes with his offer up front, or he forces you to read through the ad to locate the offer which will invariably be hidden at the tail end.

The first strategy is employed to qualify the potential buyers from the "just looking" crowd.

The sales copy is very straightforward and pushes the prospect early to decide if this offer is for him or not.

If the viewer has a genuine interest, he will continue reading the ad.

Some of you may have seen this on MSN recently, but I thought I would share my synopsis of it anyway for those interested in the "wants" of Internet users.

CNET's Download.com is a library of free and free-to-try software programs and applications for Windows, Macintosh, and handheld devices. It began 10 years ago with 3,000 titles and today has over 30,000 potential downloads.

Here are the TOP TEN DOWNLOADS over the past 10 years:

I have to be careful here because I'm not a search engine optimization wizard.

What I am going to tell you is either what I have experienced or what I have gleaned from others that I consider to be very knowledgeable on the subject.

Often business owners wonder what the best URL or business naming strategy is for an online business or product. Sometimes they even wonder if the domain name has any bearing whatsoever on the search engines.

Of course, the reason to be concerned about SEO is to be able to get as much "organic" (or non-paid search engine) traffic as possible to your web site.

Internet marketing for the solo business owner is an interesting study of very unique principles that you won't find in other fields.

On unique topic is that of "keywords."

If you want to be successful, you need to master this arena because on the Internet today, it is absolutely imperative that you focus and target your marketing effort.

If you don't pay attention to this aspect of your business, you'll lose your shirt in advertising costs and you won't attract the audience that will be hungry for your offers.

The phrase "drilling down" refers to the approach in your marketing that suggests you dig deeper and deeper into your niche in order to come up with extremely targeted and focused products, customers, advertising, partners, and keywords that will be used to position your business in a tightly focused manner.

There is so much information online these days ... if you don't tightly target what you're doing ... you will appeal to no one.

One of the "tricks" of search engine optimization has to do with the way images are treated.

It might be a revelation to many site owners that are not familiar with the way the search bots work that images are not "read" like text on the page.

Images are not really "read" and therefore usually contribute nothing to the on-page SEO efforts of the webmaster.

Nevertheless, they can contribute to search engine ranking if they are optimized properly.

It's easy to find great detail on the subject if you simply go to Google and search on the phrase "optimize images."

Online business is a game of sorts. You are competing against others in your niche for customers and their dollars.

There are only so many "winners" in the game within a niche. When enough competing businesses divide up the available customer dollars, at times, the niche can become saturated with a excess number of players.

When the "pie" (customer purchases in a given niche and time period) or prize is divided up, too many sellers can mean a small share for each winner - sometimes not enough revenue to justify the work that is going into the business.

Of the many challenges that an online solo business owner faces in growing and maintaining a business, few are as exasperating as finding that previous work you have done has been wiped out (for some reason) through no fault of the owner.

Online business owners are in the game of creating enticing offers for their products and services (or affiliate products), driving web traffic to those offers, and hopefully converting the prospects who come to the offers into paying customers.

There are several usability issues, methods, and procedures that you need to consider when designing and developing new business web sites, regardless if you hire a professional for the design or attempt to build the site yourself.

Most important are issues relating to ’upfront’ decisions such as setting clear and concise goals for your web site, determining a professional and smart set of user requirements, ensuring that the new site meets user’s expectations, setting usability goals, and providing useful content within the niche you've chosen.

To ensure the best possible outcome, designers should consider a full range of user interface issues, and work to create a site that enables the best possible user experience.

The latest research suggests that the best way to begin the construction of a web site is to have many different people propose design solutions (parallel design), and then to follow up using an iterative design approach.

This requires conducting the appropriate usability tests and using the findings to make changes to the Web site.

Web sites should be designed to facilitate and encourage efficient and effective human-computer interactions.

Designers should make every attempt to reduce the user’s workload by taking advantage of the computer’s capabilities. Your web site prospects will make the best use of you site when information is displayed in a directly usable format and content organization is highly intuitive.

Prospects also benefit from task sequences that are consistent with how they typically do their work, that do not require them to remember information for more than a few seconds, that have terminology that is readily understandable, and that do not overload them with information.

Your site visitors should not be required to wait for more than a few seconds for a page to load, and while waiting, they should be supplied with appropriate feedback. Prospects should be easily able to print information.

In addition, designers should never ‘push’ unsolicited windows or graphics to users.