Wow. Here is a service that can replace … Dreamweaver or Wordpress web page building, Photoshop image creation (like logo design), an autoresponder service, niche finding labor, keyword research tools, web hosting, directory submission, manual link building, AND a host of other goodies all for a modest monthly (or even more modest yearly) fee. If you have technical skills and tools, those can be integrated too. Or if you want affiliate coaching, local business coaching or someone else to build you site, those services are available too.
I find the outstanding appeal of Site Build It! (”SBI”) in three areas. (1) The ease of step-by-step website building software for the non-techie. Create your own website look and feel without knowing html code. (2) A software package that enables you to find the low-competition, money-making keywords in your niche. That alone is worth the price. (3) The wide range of user-friendly and automated services, including some traffic building, for the modest fee.
They teach a four-step process: “C” for create in-demand content, “T” for build traffic, “P” for presell site visitors (build relationships notably through email follow-ups and repeat site visits), and “M” for monetize.
Whether you have an existing business with an online presence or want to start an new one, whether you are new or seasoned, there is something in SBI that will probably turn your head. That’s why I have become one of their affiliates.
Any downsides? If you are a techie or prefer a particular thing not provided in SBI (a particular autoresponder or web hosting service, for example), you may want flexibility and options not provided. And of course the program will take time to master … and they do expect you to come up with your own content for web pages, articles, and emails (unless you outsource these). In short, it will take time and work.
But SBI even has a free trial to test-drive their program. And check out their video Action Guide.
Tags: Site Build It!
Eben Pagan, among others, argues that success is best achieved when we set up daily routines for each of our top-priority, results-producing tasks AND control distractions from those priorities.
That may seem simple. But think about it.
If we all did our top priority things first, daily, and avoided interruptions, we’d all be a lot more successful. In fact, most of us often don’t “get” what is of top priority.
Pagan continues that there are three pillars of making money (for information product business): The customer (or “leads”), conversion (meaning sales or sign-ups), and content.
With many leads and great content, but low conversion … you earn little money. With a great conversion rate, but few leads … you earn little money. With many leads and a great conversion rate, but a lousy product … well, your reputation will suffer and long term prospects for making money are low.
You need all three pillars. And these three pillars are your top priorities, according to Pagan, in ranking order: first customer leads, second conversion rate, and third product. If you don’t put the time and effort in your information product business according to these priorities, your business will be less than optimal.
Yes, there may be brief periods where you need to spend more time on, say, content for a new product, but normally you should have a set daily schedule that includes these three top priorities first and proportionately.
Pagan repeats his warning against letting distractions of lower priority tasks interrupt the pillars. Not least because distractions actually take a long period to recover from. Not least because mental focus increases efficiency. Stay in your mental “zone.”
I am not affiliated with Pagan’s limited-admission Ignition Coaching Club, but you may want to get on their waiting list.
Tags: Eben Pagan, working efficiently
In principle, normally, we reap what we sow. We earn from others according to our contribution to them. And if that were easy, we’d all be rich.
The difficulties in finding the sweet spot keywords for business, for example, are multifarous.
Some keywords may be ambiguous or not specific enough, crossing over between different concepts, so that they words may attract the wrong kind of people … for the split second before they leave you site. Some keywords may attract lots of viewers who have no interest in buying anything related to your site or in giving you their email address.
But probably the most difficult problem is competition.
Most keywords have too many competing pages on the web for most of us to get noticed. All the good watering holes have already attracted the mass herd. Or too few people search for other keywords to make it worth our while to bother. Or we get the popular keyword phrase, but not in the popular order … or we miss one important word, as Market Samurai notes.
Of course, if there were only ten competing web pages for your keyword, but each of these ten pages were found on large, authoritative, well established sites with thousands of backlinks and pristine ranking … it could take years for your site to appear on the front page of a search. You could be virtually lost on the second page. A few iron clad competitors may be as hard to beat as a million moderate ones.
Of course, you may be the first to capitalize on a new, popular niche, but statistically speaking, that is a bit like winning the lottery.
A more probable road to success for the small business person is to find a less competitive sub-niche possibly related to a popular one, and longer and less competitive keywords possibly related to a popular niche. Either assume the low hanging fruit in the popular niches has been taken and reach for the higher fruit or find a little tree few have even noticed.
Would you like a list of proven niches to give you ideas? Check out
Proven Niche Markets, with which I am affiliated. This includes keywords for each niche. Or see a free list of business ideas for more.
Keywords for business are best when they qualify on four different parameters: relevance, traffic, competition, and “commerciality.” Or so notes Market Samurai.
The keywords one uses on one’s site and in one’s ads or backlinks and anchor texts should be relevant to one’s site and business goals.
The keywords should have sufficient traffic … but not too much competition for the given traffic (or one risks getting lost in the crowd). A lot of traffic alone is not a sufficient indicator of a useful keyword.
And the keywords should give some indication that the people using them have commercial intent. A percentage of the people using the keywords should buy something relevant to the keyword and your site. Or if your goal is lead capture, the keyword is best if an acceptable percentage of people doing a search of that keyword sign up. And so on.
I for one am enthusiastic about this tool. You can even keep a very useful version of the research tool free if you decide not to buy after the trial period. See Dojo for training videos.
Tags: keyword research
There are good reasons to cloak affiliate links. For one, they are too difficult for people to remember or type in to a search engine to find your site. For another, hackers can use them to steal your commissions … or potential customers will just use the vendor’s URL minus your affiliate addition.
One can cloak links in a variety of ways.
1) Of course, one can use various link shorteners. The shortened link will not be in a neat and memorable form of your choosing, but it will be cloaked. Among shorteners are bit.ly (which can be set up for tracking clicks), tinyurl.com, budurl.com, snipurl.com, cli.gs, fb.me, and goo.gl most recently.
2) Create a file in your cpanel named something you like (presumably something to do with the product or service) and put the affiliate link in the html code of the file.
3) Set up a unique domain name and forward it to your affiliate link.
4) PHP Header Redirects.
Use the code: <?php header( ‘Location: http://www.yourtargetdomain.com/new_page.html’ ) ;?>
5) Use Acloaker.com according to the following video, which assumes the use of ftp software wuch as FileZilla.
Tags: link cloaking
A former Muslim college roommate once gently expressed his offense at the notion of God becoming flesh. He objected to the Jesus-born-in-Bethlehem story as relayed in Christian circles.
I saw his point. How could a great, just, wholly-other sort of a Being humiliate Himself, condescending to becoming a burping, unclean-stuff producing baby human? Sort of like a President or monarch morphing into a stray dog or a flea … only far more so.
So here we are in the middle of seasonal stress. Yet still there are things out there that incite our hearts to wonder and awe. A single cell. An evening sky. Galaxies. A colorful and fertile scene shaped by water, valley, and mountain. Mocking such things may be more than in bad taste. How much more so if at an ineffable, holy, unimaginably great God.
Of course, we sometimes chide ourselves for being too caught up in material things (like gifts and presents). There has to be something more important out there than being a Scrooge. Some greater “why” than making a buck and buying your three year old more socks.
Not that socks and money are bad things in themselves. Sometimes errands and work projects are driven by relatively important “why’s.”
Question then arises whether there can be a relationship between the mundane and the wonderful, between retail stores and ultimate purpose, between the material and the spiritual, even between humans and God. Not that there always is, but is it possible?
The story of Jesus’ birth suggests there may be. For one thing, it comes in a context in which God made the material, including our bodies. As God’s creations, we are here for God’s purposes.
For another, The Birth suggests that God did graciously condescend to relate to us mere humans. The Christmas story is that God became a man for a brief period of years and showed humanity something about meaning, ultimate purpose, and that which is most awe-inspiring. He emptied Himself for us.
And that leaves open the possibility of a greater “Why” to our seasonal busy-ness and daily business.
Tags: Christmas
Aside from lists of basic online affiliate and internet marketing resources and resources on ebook creation and outsourcing, I thought the following miscellaneous sites list, while naturally incomplete, may nonetheless be useful, partly for its brevity.
Sites for checking traffic
An index of top internet marketing gurus
Legal form generator
Outsource CD and DVD duplication
Record interviews
Video Storage, unlimited playback
Membership site manager
Buying and selling websites
Create tests to figure out what people are doing on your website.
Opt-in at foot of page
Professional looking talking cartoon heads service
Determine plagiarism of or duplicate content
Find code errors
Test viewing load capacity of your blog or site
Any additional suggestions?
Tags: online marketing, resources list
In this 23 November 2009 video, Elliott Wave adherent Robert Prechter takes the minority position that the “2008-type” recession is not over and that the US dollar’s near-term future looks bullish.
For more on the economic theory, see economic trends.
Tags: Elliott Wave, Prechter
Seth Godin has argued that the new ride-the-wave economic future is in ideas. Once it was small farms … then factories, and now in the information and internet age, what’s hot is ideas. Or ideas that people can use, will buy, and want. Ideas like those tied to social media, computer games, conservative financing, identity theft protection, online catalogs, networking, self-help, do it yourself, search engines, whatever solves the next problem.
In this economic environment, the importance of creativity is that the person who can come up with and monetize the best ideas wins.
Steve Little argues that there are a number of attributes associated with success in business, the foremost of which is creativity. Little cites Robert Epstein, who argues that there are four core competencies to creativity: “Capturing, Surrounding, Challenging, and Broadening.”
Capturing ideas is not a new idea. Here, you pull out the index cards from your back pocket or purse and write down an idea right after it passes through your mind. Or you use a palm pilot, computer, voice recorder, etc. When you wake at night, when you witness a scene on the highway, when you daydream, when you are trying to articulate an experience … whenever you come up with an idea, put in writing, record it, capture it.
Surrounding yourself with creative people and resources helps too. This is similar to broadening, which has to do with reading and researching new things in a broad range of topics. As the phrase goes, garbage in, garbage out. On the flip side, the broader and more in-depth our exposure to ideas, the more we have to work with in forming our own interconnected ideas. Of course, personal contact with creative people can be stimulating and competitive.
Further, creativity neuroscience suggests that challenging ourselves with tough problems helps develop our creative capacity. This can be in the form of real-life business challenges or in the form of puzzles and games.
There are, of course, other ways to stimulate creativity. REM sleep is thought to be important. Interestingly, Little cites a practice of Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison. Dali and Edison would briefly consider a problem, then relax in a chair or bed while holding an object in the hand. As the person began to drift off into sleep, the object would slip out of the hand, and awaken the person with a clatter. At that waking moment (”known as the hypnagogic state”), a creative thought would sometimes occur, which Dali and Edison would immediately record and then act upon.
A word of caution. There is some debate whether certain positive or negative emotions are more conducive to creative thought. Brilliant ideas can come from the depressed, for example. However, fear of failure, Little reminds us, strongly decreases creativity.
For more help on increasing creativity and success in business, visit The Perfect Business Builder (with which I am affiliated).
Tags: creativity, ideas
Optimizing your website to both rank well in search engines and attract targeted human traffic particularly involves good and relevant content, helpful internal linking for navigation purposes, and inbound links. Meta tags in the source code may also help, although they are not weighted as heavily as they once were. They come between the head tags — <head>in between these</head>.
Title Tags
Titles in title tags come between the beginning and the closing tags (between <title> and </title>). They should be about 63 characters or less so they can be read on search engines. Include keywords related to page. Have title tag for each page, and make each viewer friendly.
Title tags will appear in the upper left of the browser screen when the page is in view. Title tags are probably the most important of the tags listed here, and thought should be given not only to how the title summarizes the page it represents, but give the reader reason to read the page. A too-generic title tag is not in your best interest.
Description Tags
Description tags briefly summarize a given page. The format looks like this: <meta name=”description” content=”description in here”>, with the description between the quotation marks as here. Description tags should be less than 160 characters in length (1 to 3 sentences). If your site is indexed, the description may be important for conversions, but probably not for SEO (search engine optimization). The description should be viewer friendly, with a keyword included near beginning.
The content of a description tag may show up as the second (and possibly third) line in organic search results.
Keyword Tags
Keyword tag tag format looks like this: <meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords in here”> with the keywords between the quotation marks as here. One or perhaps two keywords are recommended per page. Keyword tags are not overly important; but don’t overdo the keywords by multiplying or spamming them. Use keywords found in the page represented. However, Google does not use keywords in the keyword tag for ranking.
Heading Tags
<h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<h2>This is heading 2</h2>
<h3>This is heading 3</h3>
Heading tags (not to be confused with <head> tags above) may make it easier for a robot to crawl your site, sort of like a bold-print outline to a human.
And of course the headers, keywords, descriptions, and titles should be representative of and relevant to the pages they represent.
Lastly, Brad Fallon notes, “SEO is a marathon, not a [quick] race.” It will probably take time for your site to be ranked in the search engines.
P.S. For further information on html basics, see my HTML Basics post or for training in internet marketing, see Niche Profit Classroom for which I am an affiliate.
Loading ...
