Category: Online Biz Fundamentals

Savvy online business owners can take advantage of all the free marketing opportunities the Internet has to offer. In order to maximize the results by using free marketing, you’ll need to put in a little bit of elbow grease and quite a few hours of time, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be astonished by how well you can get the word of your business out there and start seeing real conversions.

The best way to go about marketing your site without spending a dime is definitely the social media route. There has been a literal explosion of interest in sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and Yelp in recent years, and any online business owner who’s interested in getting the word out about their products and services would be foolish to not take advantage of these congregation spots.

The trick for making social media marketing effective is the method in which you go about it. Many business owners simply sign up their businesses for accounts and then send off hundreds if not thousands of friend requests and expect interest to come flooding back in.

The reality of the situation is that it’s not that easy – a smaller approach is definitely much more economical insofar as generating real interest in your business is concerned. Start by friending smaller groups – no larger than twenty people. If somebody sees that you’re trying to friend over two hundred people, chances are they’ll think you’re a spammer and not reply to your query. Smaller groups make you look more genuine and interesting. Also remember only to friend groups and individuals who have a stated interest in the product or services that you sell; to do otherwise is considered spam.

When sending out news feeds on these sites, the number one rule to consider is keeping your send-offs interesting. Before you send anything out, be it a “tweet” or a status update or an email announcement, take a minute and think about whether or not what you’re sending out is relevant or interesting. People will enjoy hearing about your product offers occasionally, but not three times a day. Again, you don’t want to come off as a spammer, because then people will stop friending you and the whole process will be for naught.

Also, be sure to take the time to look at the profiles of your friends and occasionally comment on what they have to say. This helps build your credibility as a “friend” and show that you take an active interest in the people who are following you on the social networking sites. Once again, more personable and less spam-like makes your social media marketing strategy much more effective.

Keywords are one of the most important aspects of your online business. Keywords will determine how many visitors you get, how much you will pay for those visitors (though in many cases it can be totally free) and how qualified those visitors are. To find the best keywords you need to use the best keyword search term suggestion tool.

There are many to choose from, but one of the best is completely free to use. Google has a keyword tool that provides you with several search parameters and it is free to use right online, you don’t need to download anything.

Since Google is one of the big 3 search engines it’s just common sense that they would know which search terms get searched for the most as well as other factors about how competitive they are.

Using their data and keyword tools can provide you with all the keyword information you need to make money online. There is a process to it though, learn the process first so you know the best way to do it.

When you start out online one very common (and very wrong) practice is to use the keywords that have a lot of monthly searches. By ‘a lot’ I mean search terms that are getting into the hundreds of thousands of searches a month.

At first glance that seems like a good idea, doesn’t it? Surely with hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site, you will be rich and retiring from your day job in no time.

But, not so fast. With those highly searched for keywords you will have so much competition that it’s very unlikely that you will be able to compete at all. That means you probably won’t get any traffic from those keywords.

A much better strategy is to find keywords that have fewer searches per month so you can rank well for them. Even if you have a list of a dozen or so keywords and each of them averages a few thousand searches a month. You can rank well for many of those terms, not just one.

Think of the traffic you would get if you had say 10 keywords that each got 1,500 searches a month and you were on page one, in the first or second spot for all ten of those keywords. That’s a lot of visitors to your website.

If you add some of these keywords to your web pages you can rank high with the search engines. It’s called search engine optimization and it is a much better investment than paying for traffic and always having to worry about what your bid prices will be.

There are many excellent tools you can use to pick out your keyword list. This process can get a little boring sometimes but it is crucial to your online success.

With so many search term suggestion tools available and many of them free, you can take some of the time and tedium out of the equation.

Video: Brad discusses how to keep your audience engaged and commenting on your blog.

It’s been out there, so why don’t you have a video made yet that promotes your business and gets you your share of online video traffic? If it is because you are intimidated by the whole process or are just a little camera shy then I only have one thing to say to you. Get over yourself! If you knew how much business you were losing on a daily basis you would try to build yourself a time machine to go back to the beginning and get a video out there for everyone to see right from the get-go.

A good video can take you from mediocre sales to astronomical sales in very short order. All you need to do is make sure it is professional and that it puts your business in a good light. Everyone with an online business should get a video out there to benefit from all the online video traffic that there is available. The numbers are astounding.

Check out what is out there first thing. You need to see what is selling then make your own version. Try to be creative and as unique as possible. You don’t want someone coming after you because they think you copied their video. You need to know about new techniques and effects that have become popular.

If you still are camera shy then you will need to hire someone to be your spokesperson for the video. Use the good sense that God gave you and pick someone who can represent you and your business accurately. You and your video have to be believable in order for people to come to you to buy your product. If you are not believable your customers will not be your customers, they will be someone elses.

Also, if you do not know anything about shooting a video there are videographers for hire who can help you get the professional quality you need to promote your business and be extremely successful. Professionalism means bigger profits for you. If you put out a rinky-dink video you will probably be laughed off of the internet. Sell yourself and your business to get the traffic you need to be a success.

When your video is complete and ready for posting make sure to get maximum exposure and post it to every video hosting site you can find. Basically, go viral. Getting your video out there for people to see is your main objective as soon as it is finished. Obviously, you will want to look at it first to see if it meets your approval. If it does, do not hesitate, get it out there. Your bottom line depends on it.

And do not forget when you sign up to these video hosting sites to put a link to your website in your profile. Search engines will sprinkle a little love on you and rank you higher in the results pages. This is another source of traffic that goes hand in hand with the online video traffic you have already generated.

Go active as soon as it is finished. Obviously, you will want to look at it first to see if it meets your approval. If it does, do not hesitate, get it out there. Your bottom line depends on it.

If you spend any time browsing Internet marketing forums online you will see a disturbing pattern of people who call themselves Internet marketers. What they really do is give those of us who do the work of Internet marketing a bad name. I have come up with three things people do that will absolutely ruin their ability to make any money online.

All you do is try to sell me crap.

If all you do online is try to peddle products and offers, you might get some traffic and you may even make a sale or two but you will never succeed as an Internet marketer. You see the Internet as a big shopping mall. I see it as a virtual community.

You would never do business with a real estate agent who was constantly asking you to sell your house even when you weren’t in the market. On the other hand if you knew a real estate agent who was a friend of yours, client, or trusted resource you would probably give your business to them. The most successful off-line business people make themselves available as speakers, as charity event coordinators etc.

You think it’s all about Google.

There is nothing worse than an Internet marketer who is just waiting for the next Google update. You might as well be playing the lottery. You can do all the hard work of search engine optimization and Link building, but if your content sucks you have a very slim chance of ranking well.

One of the best lessons I learned in Internet marketing was to give up on Google and pretend they don’t exist. The funny thing is the more I do this the more they noticed me. Google doesn’t want you to try and game their system, they want you to provide value to the Internet community on the whole. Trust me they will reward you for it.

You think communication can be automated.

You’ve set up your auto responder, your drip feed, and probably some sales pitches to automatically be delivered to people who opt in to your list over a period of time. This is a very poor way to communicate with your list. There is nothing worse than getting an e-mail from someone where the message is clearly out of date. The only reason I get the letter is because it’s part of a chain of letters that will be sent to me automatically until I unsubscribe.

If you are building an e-mail list you really need to consider how you will stay current. As a for instance I don’t use drip feeds or auto responders at all. That’s not to say I don’t do any e-mail marketing, I am building a list all the time. The difference is that I mail my list something that is current in the form of a newsletter which gets broadcast to everyone. If I sent a really good e-mail today and you join my list tomorrow, you will simply miss out on that e-mail.

Video: Brad explains what all the different internet marketing terms and acronyms are and what they mean.

In addition to buying a web address, an online business will need to be hosted somewhere. After all, a website is essentially a collection of graphic and text files uploaded onto a remote server so other surfers can access your files. If you don’t have a web host, then what you basically have is a lot of files on your own personal computer that nobody else can see.

The first major choice that an enterprising business owner will have to make in regards to web hosts is if he or she would like a free or a paid web host. There are advantages and disadvantages with both.

The major advantage for a free web host is, of course, the fact that it’s free. Taking advantage of not being forced to fork out cash monthly for web hosting can save a business hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. For those of you who are starting on a shoestring budget, a free web host can be a real option for saving money.

There are several disadvantages inherent with free web hosts, though. The first being advertisements – the vast majority of free websites force ads onto their pages in order to pay for the hosting, which can be a major turn-off to visitors. (There are some free web hosts that don’t force advertising, but many of these close due to lack of revenue – since if people have the option to turn off advertising, most will!) In addition, several of the free web hosts don’t allow FTP, or File Transfer Protocol access. While this may mean nothing at all to you at the moment, once your online business really takes off, having FTP access means that you will be able to do so much more in regards to customizing and optimizing your site.

Generally speaking, it’s much more recommended for businesses to spring for the paid web host if at all possible. There are some places where you can get basic web hosting for under ten dollars a month, and you can switch web hosts at a later date should your requirements exceed the capabilities of the cheaper web hosts.

Should you elect to go with a paid web host, the amount of options out there could compete with the number of stars in the universe. You can choose to be based out of your own country or go international – while being based in your own country may seem like the obvious option, if you’re trying to appeal to an international crowd and your target is English speakers, being based out of the US is probably the best idea, even if you are located in another English-speaking country. You can choose to pay as little as five dollars a month or as much as five hundred.

It’s worth your while to put a good amount of research into the various web hosts out there before settling on one. A general rule of thumb regarding web hosts is that the old adage is true – you tend to get what you pay for. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the 500 dollar host will suit your needs better than a 10 dollar host. It all depends upon the technical specifications of your company and how much service and capabilities you need to keep it running.

Using keyword search engine ranking to help propel your website to the top of the search engine rankings is one very effective way to drive more traffic to your website all for free.

Besides the free traffic another wonderful benefit of this type of traffic is that it meets yet another criteria for quality website traffic: all the traffic that comes to your website via this technique will be very qualified and targeted.

You may be wondering how I can know that, simple, since the people who visit your site are doing a search for a keyword phrase you are targeting you know that they have a big interest in your product or service, they are very targeted.

Don’t worry, I know this can sound complicated… and it can be complicated, but in it’s simplest form it looks a little like this:

Let’s say you are selling a book about improving your golf swing. The whole focus of your website is to help golfers improve their game by improving their swing.

You’ve isolated a list of keywords that are very focused on golf swings. These keywords get decent monthly traffic and relatively low competition.

For this example, let’s say you are targeting the keyword phrase “improve your golf swing”. Using this phrase in your website optimization plan will help the search engines find your site. They will be able to identify that you site is about improving golf swings.

If they believe your website can offer valuable information on improving golf swings to anyone who visits it, they will rank your site very high. Ideally you want your site to be ranked within the first page of results.

So, if someone goes to their web browser and types in the phrase “improve golf swing” and your site is one of the first ones that show up, they will very likely click on the link and be taken to your website.

Since they were actively searching for the term “improve golf swing” you know that they have a high level of interest in improving their golf swing which makes them a good potential customer of yours.

This technique works well for not only your website but you can also use it for distributing articles for article marketing as well as for all your blog posts.

Just use your keywords as the basis for your posts and articles. If you choose the right keywords and submit them to good article directories, your articles or blog can show up in the top ten for that particular keyword phrase… again, good free traffic.

There are a few things to keep in mind: for one thing, the algorithms that the search engines use to determine how relevant any particular site is change frequently.

To be really competitive, especially in a competitive market, you need to stay on top of your optimization efforts (or hire someone to do it for you), but you can still benefit from this method even with just a few simple tweaks to your website.

As a business owner you understand the importance of getting every advantage you can and using

keyword search engine ranking techniques is one of those advantages.

Starting an online business has become a very popular venture in recent years as more and more people become acclimated to using the Internet in their everyday lives. As little as twenty years ago, the Internet was new to the average consumer and not much more than a novelty; today, it’s rare to encounter a home in the Western world that’s not stocked with at least one computer. Most middle class houses in America have multiple computers at this point.

What this means is that starting an online business can be profitable if done correctly, given the predominance of the Internet in the average household. People who are naturally entrepreneurial or those who have already started a non-internet based business will definitely have a leg up on the rest of the game, but for the right person who’s willing to take appropriate steps to ensure success, starting an online business can be easy, fun, and even profitable.

In general, the differences between online business and traditional businesses are slight but distinct. Here are a few things that potential online business owners should take into consideration before jumping on the Information Superhighway:

Lower start up costs/high effort. One of the greatest things about online businesses is that they typically don’t cost much to get started. There’s no need to rent out a space or pay utilities, and there are lots of free avenues to advertise with over the digital waves. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that “less money invested means less work,” because nothing could be further from the truth. Online business owners often feel like their computers are grafted onto their hands!

Be a jack of all trades. It’s not good enough just to have a stellar idea or a fantastic service. In order to be successful, you need to be able to do graphic design, understand web server technology, programming, and knowledge of the Internet as a marketing medium. For those that can’t do all of this single handedly, outsourcing is an option, but this raises overall cost.

Think globally. This isn’t opening up a small Mom and Pop store in your neighborhood. The business will be able to reach all corners of the globe, thanks to the Internet. The good part is that this potentially means more business – the bad part is that owners will have to make provisions for costs such as international shipping, and maybe even pay for translated versions of their websites.

Marketers make the market. There are thousands of ways to market on the Internet, including pay-per-click, viral, drip, social networking, AdWords, and many others. Don’t know what these things mean? Owners of successful online businesses take the time to learn!

Some of these attributes make working online easier, some may prove to be more of a challenge – but they all make online businesses unique!

If you are a search engine optimizer you know how important link building is to your rankings. The problem is that these days most people are aware that link building works and have found ways to exploit and dominate the process.

I have heard stories ranging from Chinese sweatshop link builders to automated software solutions that essentially pollute the Internet with garbage (fake profiles, bogus blog comments, etc.). Anyone who attempts to game the system is usually doing everyone a disservice. There will be a short-term gain from getting ranked well for your keyword but eventually you will be removed altogether.

I am sure that the engineers at Google are already working on several plans to make link popularity less relevant in the future. I have made a short list of things I think would be useful tools to judge the popularity of a website, brand, person, product.

Mentions Within The Social Media Space.

Increasingly, social media sites like twitter offer new metrics into the world of popularity. Not only is the data up-to-date and current, it’s much more difficult for anyone to mimic a piece of content going viral and social media. Companies like Google could easily make deals with Facebook and twitter to access their data feeds and use them as a gauge for popularity.

Additionally, Google could search for mentions of the name of a company, twitter account for that company, or any subsequent products as a measure of likability.

Mentions Within E-Mail Communications.

Google is now one of the largest free e-mail providers in the world. It would be very simple for them (if they aren’t already) to monitor the number of times a link is sent through Gmail’s mail servers. This would also be difficult to game because your accounts would quickly get flagged for spam. Additionally Google can monitor the Gmail accounts to see which ones appear to be trying to increase their footprint.

Although I believe that your link popularity score will always play a role in your final ranking. I think it’s time for that metric to stop beating the primary source of data for Google. Once this happens, companies will increasingly be working towards social media strategies to help their bottom line.

If you participate in any kind of link building consider this. Quality will trump quantity in the future. One really good Flickr profile will be better than 100 crappy blog comments. Try to engage the communities within each one of your social profiles online.