Category: Online Biz Fundamentals

Keywords phrases, also called long tailed keywords, are any keyword that is made up of more than one word, usually 3 or more. This is very important for you to know since most of what you do online will most likely revolve around long tailed keywords.

Most single keywords will just be way too competitive. They will literally have millions of online marketers all competing over that word. That is why the long tailed keywords make so much more sense.

It will be much easier to rank for the term, “cheap golf balls” than it would be to rank for the term “golf balls”. Either way you will still have a lot of monthly searches but you may actually have a shot (pardon the pun) of ranking for the longer keyword phrase.

Don’t get misled by the huge amounts of monthly searches some keywords get. If they are getting hundreds of thousands of searches each month you can bet that there are millions of competitors all fighting over the scrapes.

Why bother? You can easily compile a long list of long tailed keywords. Each keyword can average over 1,500 searches a month. And the best part? You can rank high for most if not all of the keywords on your list.

Just ranking high for one of those keywords might not get you a lot of traffic, but what if you had a list of 20 long tailed keywords, each receiving about 1,500 searches a month and you were able to rank high for all of them? That is a lot of traffic, traffic that you just wouldn’t get if you tried to rank for the much more competitive keywords.

You can use the Google Keyword Tool, which is free, or many other online versions which are not, to find a great list of keywords associated with your niche market. Just start off by using a fairly broad term and then burrowing down to find a nice long list of highly targeted keywords that consist of 3 or more words.

Once you have your keyword list you can then use those keywords for many things such as article marketing and on site search engine optimization (SEO). This will allow your website or your articles to show up high on the first page of Google for a particular keyword. That means a lot of highly targeted traffic to your website… all for free.

Another important thing to keep in mind, you need to make sure that the keywords you choose not only have a decent number of monthly searches, and that they aren’t too competitive, but also that they are highly relevant to the content of your website.

This is another parameter the search engines use to determine the rank of your site. If the keywords that you are targeting do not relate really closely to your website you won’t rank as high for that keyword. It’s not a big deal, just throw out any of the words on your list that don’t relate directly to your website.

Finding the best keywords phrases for your online marketing is a very important step to take to assure your online success.

When doing your keyword research it’s very important that you don’t overlook a very obvious, but frequently overlooked fact: you don’t just want traffic to your site, you want targeted traffic. You want to draw the people to your website who are most likely to buy the product or service you are selling. For that reason you cannot forget to consider the relevant keyword when evaluating your keyword list.

Make sure that the keywords you are targeting are relevant to what your website is promoting. If you find that you have kind of missed the boat you can either renew your keyword list or change some of the content on your website to make it match up more closely with your keyword list.

All the search engines consider relevance very highly. If you target keywords that are not closely related to your website, the search engines will find that you have very low relevance and won’t rank your site as high.

Do not get too caught up on one or two word keywords, in almost all cases they will be much too competitive and you will have a very hard time ranking for them. Instead, find a large list of keyword phrases. When you have a 3 or 4 word keyword phrase you may not get quite as many searches but you also won’t have nearly as much competition.

Longer keyword phrases can still deliver a lot of searches, probably not as many as the more popular one and two word phrases, but they will also be much less competitive.

When you first start your keyword research you can use many tools online, some of them are free, some of them are not. If you have a limited budget you should start with the free Google keyword tool. This one tool can give you all the information you need to compile an excellent keyword list.

Again, the basics of a good keyword list is to have keywords that get a lot of monthly searches (around 1,500) and few competitors (usually anything less than 20,000, though this can vary, you have to find your own parameters).

It may take you and little trial and error to find the highly relevant, well searched for keywords that also don’t have a lot of competition. This process can sometimes get a little tedious, but remember a good keyword list is like money in the bank. When you have a highly targeted keyword list you can get a lot of quality traffic to your website and that can relate directly into sales.

To recap, in order to build a top notch keyword list that will allow you to get a ton of very targeted traffic you will need to consider several variables. One of them is to find only the most relevant keyword possible. The keyword must relate directly to the subject of your website. If it does you can have a much higher conversion rate and you can also get a lot more organic traffic.

Whether you are are all on your own or you own a big internet business, you will need to find the best online marketing strategy for your business. There are various elements to putting together an effective marketing plan. If you can do it yourself, great, but if you think you need some help hire a company to do the work for you.

There are a lot of issues you need to keep track of in order to have your online business be profitable. Things like creating an effective marketing funnel and choosing the right product or service to sell.

But the one biggest thing you have to do to have a successful online business is to use multiple sources of traffic generation to drive traffic to your website. This traffic will be your customers. No business, online or off, can survive if they don’t have plenty of customers.

One of the first things you need to learn is that when it comes to traffic online you will need quantity and quality. For these purposes, quality means finding people who love the product or service that you are selling and who are actually willing to spend money on it.

If you can get enough qualified people to your website it is like shooting fish in a barrel. Putting your offer in front of those people who are looking for your offer is about as easy as it gets.

But how do you get the traffic to your site? With hundreds of various options to use to get traffic which one do you choose to do? For most people starting with some free online traffic generating methods is the best way to go.

Simple things like search engine optimization and article marketing are great ways to get started. They are easy to learn, don’t take a lot of time to do and they are free.

As your business progresses it’s pretty common to add other forms of traffic generation, some paid and some free. At this point you may also decide that your time is better served elsewhere so you might want to hire a company or individual to do it for you.

It’s generally a good idea to have between 3 to 5 different methods that you use to generate traffic. The whole don’t put all your eggs in one basket thing. The only problem with this method, especially if you have several sites online that you are promoting, is that keeping tabs on all your promotions can get pretty overwhelming.

That is why hiring a company to take care of the day to day activities associated with it can make your life much easier. True, you will have to pay them and that will cut into your profit margin, but your time is worth something too and the overall cost shouldn’t be that much.

So, to sum up: your biggest job online is to get quality traffic to your website so you can make sales. Doing much of the work yourself when you first start to save money then hiring a company to handle your online marketing strategy once you are profitable is an excellent game plan to follow.

Using the right search engine marketing solution for your online business is imperative to the long term success of your business. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to continually drive hordes of very targeted visitors to your website.

Seo can be very complicated, but you can also utilize a few simple techniques and while you won’t get the full benefit, you will still see a benefit.

If you want to get the full effect of an active seo marketing campaign you may want to consider hiring a company to do your seo for you. Having access to a professional who will take care of all the day to day issues associated with your seo will free you up to take care of other areas of your business.

An effective seo game plan will require virtually a full time commitment since the search engines base all their results on complicated, and ever changing, algorithms. It would be virtually impossible to keep on top of it on a day to day basis and still run other aspects of your business.

Since many online businesses simply aren’t that knowledgeable about seo you can really pull away from a lot of your competitors if you get a little help. With so many billions of websites all clamoring for attention, you will need all the help you can get to allow your website to shine through all the dust.

When you set out to find the right company to work with there are some things you want to be on the lookout for:

1. Any company you are considering hiring for your seo should provide you with the initial website seo analysis. Basically they will look at your site and determine what strengths and weaknesses you may have. This will help establish a starting point and clarify what you need to work on.

2. The company will help you choose the best keywords for your site and product. This is crucial, everything hinges on choosing the best combination of frequently searched and low competition keywords. If a mistake is made here, the whole campaign will be in jeopardy.

During this step the company will also analyze the sites of your competitors to see what keywords they are ranking well for. This can help them achieve a clearer picture of just what needs to be done.

3. Now that the keywords have been chosen, the on site seo can begin. Optimizing certain areas of your site such as the Meta and heading tags will be the primary focus at this stage. This is the most complicated part of the process, there are many areas on your site and things that can be done to get the greatest impact.

4. Once your site is all “shiny” and seo ready, they will manually submit it to the major search engines.

5. Of course, now that your site has been optimized and submitted, you want to make sure that all these changes are really working. That’s why you need to take the time to track your site and results. Having quality, reliable tracking software is a must and should be provided by the seo company.

Keep these tips in mind when you start looking for your own search engine marketing solution and a company to help you put it all together.

People e-mail me all the time with the question of how to make money online. Although the question itself sounds simple enough, the reality is that without some direction from you in terms of what your current skill set is you might as well be asking me how to get a job. When you want a job you usually pick a field that you have already worked in or have education in. Making money on the Internet is not a whole lot different.

Chances are you know how to do something that other people need to be educated in. Maybe it’s as simple as you being a plumber. You could easily make videos about how to fix common household problems related to plumbing and sell them for a small fee online. Maybe even give some away as a way to build reciprocity with your audience. If you don’t have a formal education or training, perhaps there is something that you have learned recently that you could leverage into a product.

Something as simple as setting up a proper profile on twitter, YouTube, Google maps etc. might be second nature to you. But a small business owner may not have the first idea about setting these things up. That’s the business that almost anyone could do in their hometown.

It has never been cheaper to start a new business than today. You can have a free website running in less than 30 minutes. There is no excuse for not trying something new every day until you find what works for you. Your online business is no different than the off-line business world. You need to try new things constantly to see what works. Once you find something that works all you need to do is work on scaling it as large as you can.

If you are still asking the basic question, “how do I make money online?” Consider that you might really be asking “what do I want to do when I grow up? If you still don’t know the answer you should probably consider looking at additional education for yourself.

One of the most often discussed debates when it comes to the world of online business is the method with which owners offer their customers to pay for the services rendered. Everybody has heard the tale about the witless consumer who gave his or her credit card number to some nameless company on the Internet and ended up with thousands of dollars charged to his or her card. There are about a thousand variations on the same horror story, which means that customers have high standards when it comes to giving out access to their financial resources online.

Namely, your site is going to have to offer your customers a way to conduct transactions with you in a method that is both secure and user-friendly. Not having a payment method listed on your site that is well-respected and trusted will seem unprofessional and send the vast majority of potential customers elsewhere. With the competitiveness of the online market, there’s no reason to lose a customer base due to perceived overtures of unreliability.

Most online businesses these days conduct their transactions through PayPal or through some form of online shopping cart. The pros and cons of both can be debated for days on end, but here is a quick overview of both.

PayPal is well known and proven, and has high levels of customer satisfaction. Even more intriguingly, it’s free of monthly fees for the user. The payment for services through PayPal is docked through a service charge, which is taken out of every transaction. There is much debate about at what point PayPal starts to become less cost-effective than a shopping cart, but the overall rule of thumb seems to be that if your business does less than 1000 dollars a month of money exchange, PayPal seems to be the best option. If your revenue level is higher than that, it’s best to have both a PayPal option as well as a shopping cart.

A shopping cart system requires a monthly maintenance fee, which can seem prohibitive to smaller businesses. However, once your business sees serious growth, it’s a good idea to invest in shopping cart services, if nothing else than for the peace of mind they can bring. Paying the fee means that somebody else deals with the hassle of embedding the software into your site, takes care of all the bugs that pop up, and generally ensures that things are running smoothly. With a PayPal account, the owner has to add this to the list of responsibilities.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that as a respectable online business owner, you must offer your customers some form of reliable payment method. Otherwise, you can kiss a great deal of potential revenue goodbye when customers seek out your competition for a more secure method of payment.

The internet hasn’t been around all that long, but it has quickly become a part of our daily lives. Even if we don’t go online every day, you can bet that the people and businesses we deal with do go online every day. But regardless of who is going online or why, it all comes down to one thing: communication. One of the most popular forms of this is the blog. But what is blogging? That’s a straightforward question, so let’s take a look at the answer.

The word ‘blog’ derives it name from a combination of the words ‘web log’. When they first started, that’s exactly what they were. Most people would use them as a form of an online journal of their daily lives, and many of them would only share their blogs with family and friends. Then came what are commonly called mommy blogs. These were blogs typically started by stay at home moms to communicate with other moms, but they also added some elements of making money to their blogs. Next were the flat-out money making blogs which tend to be more contrived; with each post being designed to maximize the revenue of the blog.

So, when someone asks “what is blogging?”, the best answer is “it depends”. That’s because each type of blog requires a different approach. However, there are several similarities between all blogs. Updating your blog on a regular basis, making it look good, and driving traffic to it are a few of the things most blogs have in common.

One of the best things about blogs is that you can start blogging for free. The WordPress and Blogger platforms are just two of the services that allow you to easily set up a blog and to do so for no cost at all. However, you will have to host your blog on their servers, and your domain name will contain “blogger” or “wordpress” as part of it. If you have a blog that’s meant for family and friends, then this should be okay. However, if you plan on making money with your blog, then you need to buy your own domain name and hosting.

To get started, figure out what you want your blog to be about. Once that’s done, you can think of a name for your blog. The next step is to go to whichever blogging site you want to try (Blogger, WordPress, etc.) and sign up for an account. If someone else already has used the same name for their blog (when using the free option), you will have to come up with a different name.

Now you’re ready to start posting to your blog. This is usually done by logging into your blogging account and then clicking on “new post”. Write your post, then click “submit”. There you go! You have just made your first post. Now if some asks you what is blogging, you can say it’s an easy way to have your own site online.

You hear a lot about niche marketing online. All that means is to find a little sub section in a market, one that has decent amount of interest but not much competition and fly under the radar. To do that, you will need to find niche keywords for that niche market.

There are many great markets you can make money in online. But you will save yourself a lot of time and effort if you don’t try to go toe to toe with the ‘big boys’.

For example, lets say you want to make money in the weight loss market, which is an extremely competitive market. Why make your life harder than it needs to be by trying to go straight on against millions of competitors? That’s just silly.

Instead, why not find a ‘little’ sub section of that market where there will be much less competition but still enough interest for you to make a very nice living (and remember, this is just one website. You can repeat this method as many times as you want and have dozens of niche websites all making you money).

So, instead of focusing on such a broad term as weight loss, why not find a niche that targets “middle aged women and weight loss”? Or how about “teenage boys weight loss”? See what I mean, you are still in the weight loss market but you are targeting a more precise sub section of the market instead of trying to throw a net over the whole ocean.

Doing this will make it so much easier to make money online. It will just make your life so much simpler and you can find a great list of highly targeted keywords that you can rank for a lot more easily than you would if you went with the broad weight loss terms.

To find highly targeted keywords for your niche all you have to do is to use the free Google Keyword Tool online. Start by entering a broad search term related to your niche, say weight loss for moms. The tool will give you a list of up to two hundred variations of that keyword.

Some of the variations will work, some won’t. But it will give you a great place to start. From there you can drill down even further until you have a nice big keyword list to work from.

You also want to make sure that the keywords you choose are highly relevant to your website. Don’t choose a bunch of keywords that have a high monthly search volume if they are not highly relevant to what your website is all about. The traffic that you get won’t be very targeted and your conversions will suffer.

Finding great niche keywords is one of the most important tasks you can master to have a successful online business. Good keywords may take some time to find but when you do they are like money in the bank. Use the free tools online or invest in some down loadable software, it’s up to you. Just make sure you know what you need to look for and the difference between a good keyword and a not so good keyword.

Getting the most out of the free, organic, search results should be the goal of any online business owner. Hey, the traffic is free and ultra targeted, what more could you ask for? Finding and implementing the best seo strategies will depend mostly on your existing knowledge, if any, and your budget.

You know the saying: those that can’t do… hire. Well, maybe that’s not really the way it goes, but it works. If you don’t know much about seo and /or don’t have the time or inclination to learn, you can hire a company to do the work for you.

There are a lot of companies that specialize in this and many of them are quite reasonable in their pricing structure.

If you can’t afford to hire a company at this stage in the game, don’t worry, with a little knowledge and a few simple tweaks you can easily benefit from some basic seo and at least get your foot in the door.

Once you are making more money online you can invest in the knowledge, or hire someone, to take your seo efforts to the next level. For now, though, you can start here:

1. It all starts with your keyword list. Choosing the right keywords for your onsite seo has to be the first step, everything revolves around these keywords.

Make sure that you choose words, or phrases, that get at least one thousand searches a month and less than 20,000 competitors. They must also be closely targeted and highly relevant to the content of your website.

Search engines will either reward or penalize you on the relevance of your keywords, you don’t want to be penalized.

Once you’ve got your keywords focus on placing them in your meta tags, your headers and footers to start. This will grab the attention of the search engine spiders and they will move your site to the top of the rankings if they think it is highly relevant.

2. You can use a similar method to drive traffic to your website by writing and submitting quality, keyword focused articles. Now, this is the point when a lot of people make a mistake; they don’t write a quality informative article, instead they try to stuff as many keywords as possible into it until is is virtually all gibberish.

You won’t be rewarded for that, the search engines are too smart. Write your article around a keyword, but don’t write for the search engines, write for people.

If you supply your readers with genuinely helpful information, and optimize it with keywords, your article can get a top rating in the search engines and subsequently drive a lot of traffic to your website.

Don’t drive yourself into the poor house when you’re just starting out online by hiring an seo company that you can’t really afford. First, start making some money and then you can outsource much of your daily work. In the meantime, use these tips and utilize these seo strategies

to keep the traffic flowing and the cash register (virtual, of course) ringing.

Obviously, the first place to start with any business is to come up with an idea. What, exactly, is up for sale and what is the best way to attract the customer to the product? This has been the main focus of all businesses, whether online or brick and mortar, for centuries.

For those who already have a traditional business, this is the obvious place to start. Even businesses that primarily work in the “real world” can benefit from having an online outlet, if for nothing else than to reap the benefits of the worldwide marketing aspect.

However, one of the most common mistakes that a “real world” business makes when transitioning to an online outlet is that they become what is known as a “brochure website,” where the website itself offers little information other than scanned brochures and directions to the store itself. While there is some merit to be had in this sort of website – and it is, indeed, better than no website at all – this doesn’t maximize the potential that the Internet has in furthering the cause of businesses.

For businesses who are looking to transfer from the “real world” to the digital one, it’s recommended to consider looking at the website as if it was the main focus of the business, rather than a peripheral concern. If a business owner was starting from scratch with a website and trying to sell the product, how important would the website itself be? It would be vital, because the website is the medium that sells the product. Websites who have “real world” businesses should view their site in the same way.

For those who are looking to start an online business from scratch, the most important thing to do is research. What are competitors offering in the field? How much are they charging, and what do their websites look like? Try Google searching for others who are offering the same things that you would like to sell, and check out their quality and pricing.

Next, sit down and consider how you can improve upon what your future competitors have already brought to the table. Do most of the sites you see have uninspiring websites or difficult navigation? Take note and make sure not to make the same mistakes when it’s time for you to launch your own site.

Remember that your online business doesn’t have to necessarily be unique in order to be successful. It just has to be a more appealing option to the consumer than the others already on the market. Take note on what your competition is doing and envision making it better. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel to find success – but if you can package it better or get it out faster, that’s a major step in the right direction!