The nature of SEO has changed more in the past year than it did in the previous five years combined. To better serve our clients, we need to commit to changing our SEO strategies and tactics at a similar pace. Mobile technologies and voice recognition and are altering the way people access the internet, with fifty percent of consumers using voice search more frequently now than they did 12 months ago.

I find it useful to think about SEO from two perspectives: users and bots. Search engine optimization is focused more on the process of optimizing for users’ queries. Googlebot optimization is focused on how Google’s crawler accesses your site. While both types of optimization aim to make your page more visible and may impact your SERPs, SEO places a heavier emphasis on user experience, while spider or crawler optimization is entirely about appealing to bots. As Neil Patel says on KISSmetrics:

Search engine optimization is focused more upon the process of optimizing for user’s queries. Googlebot optimization is focused upon how Google’s crawler accesses your site.

Before we discuss content, keywords and social signals, let’s make sure your site is search engine friendly so that Googlebot can understand your content strategy.

Make Your Website Friendly to Bots and Search Engines

Ensure Your Pages Are Crawlable

Your page is crawlable when search engine spiders can find and follow links within your website, so you’ll have to configure your .htaccess and robots.txt so that they don’t block your site’s critical pages. You may also want to provide text versions of pages that rely heavily on rich media files, such as Flash and Silverlight.

Of course, the opposite is true if you do want to prevent a page from showing up in search results. In this case, you’ll need to manually block the page from being indexed by using the noindex robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. Note that if you use noindex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag, you should not disallow the page in robots.txt, The page must be crawled before the tag will be seen and obeyed.

Avoid Redirect Chains

When your website has long redirect chains, i.e. a large number of 301 and 302 redirects in a row, spiders such as Googlebot may drop off before they reach your destination page, which means that page won’t be indexed. Best practice with redirects is to have as few as possible on your website, and no more than two in a row.

Fix Broken Links

The conventional wisdom late last year was that broken links do not play a substantial role in rankings, even though they greatly impede Googlebot’s ability to index and rank your website. That said, Google’s algorithm has improved substantially over the years, and anything that affects user experience is likely to impact search engine ranking.

Set Parameters on Dynamic URLs

Spiders treat multiple dynamic URLs that lead to the same page as separate pages. You can manage your URL parameters by going to your Google Search Console and clicking Crawl > Search Parameters. From here, you can let Googlebot know if your CMS adds parameters to your URLs that doesn’t change a page’s content.

Clean Up Your Sitemap

XML sitemaps help both your users and spider bots by making your content better organized and easier to find. Try to keep your sitemap up-to-date and purge it of any clutter that may harm your site’s usability, including 400-level pages, unnecessary redirects, non-canonical pages, and blocked pages.

Feeds Still Help

Feeds, such as RSS, XML, and Atom, allow websites to deliver content to users even when they’re not browsing your website. While RSS feeds have long been a good way to boost your readership and engagement, they’re also among the most visited sites by Googlebot. When your website receives an update (e.g. new products, blog post, website update, etc.) submit it to Google’s Feed Burner so that you’re sure it’s properly indexed.

Don’t Build External Links: Earn Them

Evaluate your inbound link profile. Google only wants to count links you editorially “earn.” Google has an uncanny ability to spot earned or editorial vs. manipulative links. Many of Google’s algorithm updates over the past two years have targeted websites with links via directories, forums, account profiles, guest posting, and commenting. Yet there remains a strong correlation between the number of spider visits and the number of quality external links.

Maintain Internal Link Integrity

A well-organized internal linking structure may also improve user experience, especially if users can reach any area of your website in three clicks. Making everything more easily accessible in general means visitors will linger longer, which may improve your SERPs.

Content, Keywords and Social Signals

Keyword matching is now intent matching. Avoid AdWords-only keyword research. Try adding these techniques to your keyword discovery process.

Use Google Suggest

Many queries with 100s or 1000s of monthly searches don’t show up in AdWords, however, they will appear in Google Suggest. Keyword Tool is a great way to streamline this process.

Broaden Your Keyword and Topic Base

How do your client’s competitors, customers, and industry professionals describe what you are promoting?  Visit industry-related sites, forums, and association sites. Look at the event calendars for seminar titles, competitor ads and member posts. Often, you’ll discover valuable keywords or hot topics that you or your client missed.

Include the voice of the customer. Popular questions, phrases, and terms that your audience uses in web forums/social media are excellent sources of keyword data expansion.

Use PPC Data

If you are using AdWords, make sure to look at the actual search queries that generated your impressions. It is always eye-opening to discover the actual terms used by your visitors, not just the terms you bid on. Google says more than 40% of search terms are unique, meaning that they have never been used before. Often these queries reveal terrific organic keyword or topic optimization opportunities.

Voice and Mobile Search

Consumers no longer have to type awkward or disjointed queries into their phones. Now, anyone can pick up their phone and ask it, “where can I find wide-fit, black men’s dress shoes for under $100?” and Siri, Cortana, or Google Now will instantly provide the answer they’re looking for. The growth of voice search is sure to lead to many more natural language queries that provide much greater amounts of contextual information and data about the searcher’s true intent. Voice search is a critical factor for local businesses, especially retailers, restaurateurs and those in services and trade industries.

Content Creation

Only a short while ago, we could still create & scale keyword-targeted pages of “good, unique content.” Remember, search engines are improving in their ability to understand meaning and context, not just keywords.

Pages with numerous keywords and keyword permutations are frequently outranked by pages with the following attributes:

• Relevant – contains content the engines can interpret as on-the-topic to the searcher’s intent & phrasing
• One-of-a-Kind – doesn’t appear elsewhere on the web
• Helpful – resolves the searcher’s query in a useful, efficient manner
• Uniquely Valuable – provides information that’s unavailable (or hard to get) elsewhere
• Great UX– is easy & pleasurable to consume on any device

Social Media Signals

In 2014, many people believed that there was a strong correlation between tweets (and Facebook and Google+ shares) and higher SEO rankings. What appears to be true is that the value of social media in search is that social shares expose content to those who might link to it (and amplify in other ways)

Facebook still the biggest driver of social traffic, and most of that traffic still comes from a small percentage of content. Social links & shares skew to the top 5% of content. We use Facebook ads to buy exposure, which lead to links via sharing, and do not purchase links themselves.

Don’t Publish Content Just to Get Links and Rankings

Know what you’re up against. Writing to go viral is likely to fail. Facebook is still the biggest driver of social traffic, and most of that traffic comes from a small percentage of content. The top 10% drove 94.3%. This illustrates the importance of optimizing content for social sharing. For example, Upworthy A/B tests every piece of content with at least four headlines, continually refining for clicks per share and shares per view.

• Be Strategic and Relevant– the content must tie to business goals and fit with your branding
• Identify and Target Likely Amplifiers – there should be an obvious answer to the question “who will help spread this content and why?”
• Think Long-term: Don’t Publish Once and Forget– most content will fail; you need to be willing to invest longer and harder than the competition to find success

Measuring Success

Before beginning any marketing initiative, we start by creating a model that specifically lists the business objectives, goals and targets, purpose, and methodology. It’s important to have at least one goal in each of these three categories: acquisition, behavior, conversion.

This allows us to streamline reporting, understand what worked and what did not, and understand the return on SEO investment. This approach also protects clients from investments with diminishing returns, as can be the case with trying to apply every SEO “trick in the book.”

Traffic and Performance by Keyword for Search Traffic Performance by Page

Google stopped providing organic keyword data a few years ago. While we have been somewhat successful trying to back into this information through combining data from Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console), Google Analytics, AdWords and Facebook Insights, we find evaluating traffic by page and source presents a more accurate picture or the customer’s experience and intent.

Make sure whatever analytics application you use is tracking your referral information properly. A fair amount of social media and mobile traffic can end up recorded as direct traffic. If necessary, tag your links to make sure you can identify each channel properly.

SEO is getting harder. More changes are coming, and fast. The “exciting new SEO miracle tactic” you read on a blog last year could have you in hot water with Google this year. Not all tactics make sense for every business. A corporate website selling software in North America is going to have vastly different needs and customers from a new restaurant or a recently-launched online clothing store.

Program and code your website for bots. Understand your customers’ needs and intent. Design and write for visitors. Learn how to use analytics to track performance. Choose your online resources carefully.

One of my favorite resources is social media. I use it to talk to other SEO professionals. Most of what I have learned is thanks to the many qualified professionals I’ve been fortunate enough to work with over the years. I’d love to hear from you, too!

A colleague and I were comparing notes about our experiences on projects that required working with website developers on a 1099 rather than W-2 basis. We agreed to share it hoping the info might help customers as well as colleagues, and to get new ideas.

I owned and operated two photography studios for many years. New digital technology allowed many without the required skills and talents to enter the profession and caused downward pressure on prices. While not a bad thing, disruptive technology changes more than output: it changes process. Luck can sometimes look like competence until something goes wrong. By hiring someone, you are trusting your client relationship to a relatively unknown entity.

It’s the same in web design and development business. We have run into some freelance landmines over the years by making hiring decisions before getting answers to the right questions.

I see many similarities with quite a few WordPress developers. One-click installs, tens of thousands of plugins and themes, and reused code are some of the strengths of WordPress, but they can also be its pitfalls. Developers do not know what they do not know. It’s our job to find out.

Here are some of the questions we look to answer before making hires:

• Check references. Hire a developer and you become a client. Talk to a few real clients to see how reliable and responsive your prospective hire is.
• Check their work. Did they overdo plugins, particularly unsupported ones, use hacks, fail to use child themes, or neglect backups with little concern for the future?
• How productive are they? Get a feel for what an hour of their time equates to in your time. Low-cost hires on crowd-sourcing sites can be falsely seductive.
• How do they approach problems or contingencies? Stuff goes wrong and scopes change. Know what the total costs are.
• Ask about a warranty period. We offer clients a 30-day warranty after launch. After that, everything is new work. What kind of support can you expect?
• How long has your candidate been in business? We love working with new talent. However, many come and go because of school, career, or family. While longevity alone is not a guarantee of success, one does need a certain degree of client relationship skills to hang in for the long-term.
• If the project has a tight timeline, have a backup developer in mind. Many times, we had an agreement with a developer that was worthless because they were over-committed and moved to a $10k project that became available after agreeing to our $1k job.

• 75% of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of a company based on the design of its website – Guidelines for web credibility persuasive technology lab, Stanford University
• 68% of shoppers will distrust a site that doesn’t have a professional appearance – emarketer.com study

Design is significantly cheaper than advertising and many other branding efforts. This makes the return on the design investment even that much more impressive. While design may be less expensive, it certainly has the largest reach and the most direct impact on sales.

Less then 10% of a brands entire audience will have seen an ad before setting out to buy the product. Brand identity / package design is seen by literally 100% of possible consumers, providing the last and most important opportunity to influence the sale.

Wall street analyzes brand identity design as making the highest contribution to brand valuation. Data based on a couple dozen high profile case studies shows that the specific return on investment in design is 50 times that of advertising or any other branding effort.

“41% of U.S. internet users threatened to stop buying from companies that sent irrelevant messages, according to a recent CMO Council study.”

Unless email marketers increase message relevancy, they will waste millions of dollars on email campaigns that are sure to be deleted or end up in junk folders, while losing customers forever.

So how does a business make sure messages are relevant? One of the best ways to ensure relevancy is by sending a message based on customer behavior, using event triggered messaging. Customers trigger the next message they will receive by their actions, such as subscription sign-up or renewal, event registration, purchases, shopping cart abandonment, clicking on certain content in an email, or on a website. Best of all, the process is automated, reducing labor costs and minimizing human error.

Event triggered messaging allows you to segment and automatically create personalized conversations based on demographics, purchase history, life-cycle, last open, last read and much more, instantly increasing relevancy and increasing your response rate, and new conversations may be triggered from almost any customer touch point.

In every circumstance, event triggered messaging gives you the power and flexibility to decide what messages you will send in response to a recipient initiated action. You can also decide to which customer or prospect you will send that particular message or series of messages. You are not just sending emails; you’re beginning a conversation that’s relevant and automated.

Automated event triggered messages can help you close more sales, nurture leads effectively, increase customer satisfaction and improve retention.

Messages can be triggered by a single event, or throughout a series of events, with the recipient determining which message he or she receives by the action taken at each step along the way, effectively creating a conversation that is relevant to the customer’s needs at each step.

Here are just some of the types of trigger events that can start a conversation:

• Fills out a website forms
• Abandons form
• Abandons shopping cart
• Buys a particular product
• Product returns
• Subscribes to a list
• Registers for an event, such as a conference or seminar
• Clicks on a particular link in email message
• Updates profile
• Downloads a whitepaper (lead nurturing)
• Email delivery of educational course material
• Website Registration

Using event triggered messaging to automate your customer conversations not only improves your email campaign performance and customer relationships, it is also saves time and money spent on manual processing and involved programming. Improved performance and lower costs-now that’s a welcome message in today’s economic climate.

Email marketing is one of the most effective return channels, outperforming most other marketing methods. But it’s time to up your game or risk losing customers for good. To do that you need a better strategy; you also need a more sophisticated email solution to get the results.

Ready to learn more? Call 413.213.0715  for more information or submit a request online.

 

Great design pays for itself—over and over again. Some food for thought:

• 75% of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of a company based on the design of its website – Guidelines for web credibility persuasive technology lab, Stanford University
• 68% of shoppers will distrust a site that doesn’t have a professional appearance – emarketer.com study

Design is significantly cheaper than advertising and many other branding efforts. This makes the return on the design investment even that much more impressive.

While design may be less expensive, it certainly has the largest reach and the most direct impact on sales. Less then 10% of a brands entire audience will have seen an ad before setting out to buy the product. Brand identity / package design is seen by literally 100% of possible consumers, providing the last and most important opportunity to influence the sale.

Wall street analyzes brand identity design as making the highest contribution to brand valuation. Data based on a couple dozen high profile case studies shows that the specific return on investment in design is 50 times that of advertising or any other branding effort.

If your website is an integral part of your company’s marketing, find another place to cut costs.

 

Putting the Pieces Together for a Successful Contest Promotion.

Running a contest can be a powerful way to build word of mouth and long-term customer relationships. However contest promotion takes a lot more than a cool prize. It takes planning, clear objectives, timing integrating different marketing channels—and legwork.

Define your goals-why are you running this contest? Are you trying to get more brand awareness? Introduce new products or services? Gain consumer insight? Build an email or mobiles subscriber base? Increase your level social media engagement How will you measure success?

A contest is a terrific way to start a conversation. It is up to you to keep the buzz going. Don’t sit back and expect customers to do the work for you. Monitor the conversations, whether on Facebook, Twitter, bogs or other social sites. Every conversation is an opportunity to engage with your customers, and for them to engage with your brand.

Be relevant Make sure the contests prize is of interest to your customers. Just because you think a 52 inch flat screen TV is worth the effort you’re asking your customers to make, don’t assume they do. Match the prize to your customer profile.

Choose the right mediums and integrate them

Engage your team

Don’t underestimate the importance of internal communications. For many bricks and mortar business, the success of your contest lies in the hands of your front line people. If they are engaged and enthusiastic, they will transfer this to your customers. If not, chances are your contest will fizzle out , results will be disappointing and you could give up on a productive marketing channel.

Timing is everything

Know when to start and when to stop. Pick a time that allows you to focus the appropriate energy on your contests. Consider seasonality, other overlapping promotions, holidays and other events that may draw attention and energy away from your contest. Don’t limit participation by choosing too tight a window between launch and your contest cutoff date. Contests often pick up steam after the first week or so. It takes time for customers to begin talking about your contest and spreading the word. After all, that’s one of the main objectives. Conversely, don’t let the contest linger on too long in the hope you’ll get every possible participant. Maintaining the excitement will be next to impossible.

Having a contest on Facebook won’t be very productive if the majority of your customers are not on Facebook. Text messaging, email, contest entry websites and print, working together can provide amazing results while building or reinforcing your brand identity.

Integrate your existing marketing channels and consider additional opportunities. Provide alternative means of entries. Some states have laws requiring this. For example during this contest we combined the following marketing channels to create a synergy and promote a new brand:

• A contest website
• Facebook application
• Monile with text to enter
• Point of sale posters, flyers and handouts
• Email marketing
• Website updates
• Social media
• Google Analytics

Obey The Law

Last but not least make sure you are in compliance with your state contest or sweepstakes laws. You know the difference between a contest and a sweepstakes right?

• A “sweepstakes” is a game of chance one plays voluntarily and for which one is not required to pay anything to enter in order to win a prize.
• A “skill contest” is a puzzle, game, competition, or other contest in which: A prize is awarded or offered; The outcome depends on the contestant’s skill, and A purchase, payment or donation is, or seems to be, required, to enter the contest.

Most of all, be memorable.

Engage customers during the contest. Don’t use the conversation solely to promote. Ask questions, find out more about your participants interests, pay attention to the little things and be transparent. You’ll discover that the buzz is still going long after the contest ends. After all that’s why you started this process in the first place.

Many entrepreneurs go into business as sole proprietors or with a partner and from the get-go they are off and running with extra long workdays to get their business off the ground. Being a small business owner is fraught with juggling priorities and flexing skills by working several jobs at once. This ongoing pressure makes it easy to let initial data studies get out-of-date, and slip into reliance on guesswork and hunches to forecast and plan business strategy.

Don’t Assume

However, leaving behind the data stream of detailed information that you assembled when considering taking on this business, and trading it for your best guess when planning is a big mistake. While you may think that you know what is happening in the marketplace both with competitors and customers, making assumptions is a very bad idea.

Marketplaces and customer opinions can change rapidly and if you do not keep abreast of the trends and make forecasts from statistical data, you are wasting both money and time. Using analytics to make your judgment calls is the best practice–the only solid way to do business on a consistent basis. You may get lucky with an assumption or two, however sooner or later, you will find that your guesses were way off base and you are stuck with a lot of unnecessary inventory or you do not have enough to meet your clients’ needs.

Cost of Doing Business

If you are not using statistical analytics to determine your business decision because you think that you cannot afford to pay an analyst, you can start with free analytic services. If your business transactions primarily occur online, you can use the free statistics from Google to start out–Google Analytics. Many website operators also have their own analytics programs that come with the requested website. Other data can be assembled from accounting software such as QuickBooks. While free services may only get you started on the right path, they will provide helpful data as to where your customers are originating, what they are buying and how often they return.

Other free analytical programs can be found online that will help you survey your customers before and after they buy from you. All of the data that you gain using these methods can help you begin to put together a picture of your ideal customer.<!–more–>

Finding Your Flaws

Companies that are serious about growing their businesses know that studying the analytics of their marketing and sales information is the foundation of moving forward. Experts can consult with you to point out where your marketing planning is moving away from the facts that the analytics are telling you. Analytics can offer you valuable feedback as to why some items sell and others do not. You can also test suppositions before you put them into place fully to get the maximum value for your sales and marketing dollars.

Beating Your Competitors

In the cutthroat business world, competitors will take your business if you do not stay ahead of the game. You need to know your customers inside and out, why they have chosen your business and how you can keep them loyal. Much of customer loyalty comes from responsive customer service and providing what the customer needs in a timely manner.

If you guess that blue snowsuits are going to be the trend this year, but all of the customers are excited about the new pink snowsuits to help breast cancer survivors, you will lose immediate sales and possibly many loyal customers if you do not have the pink ones. No business can survive if those circumstances are repeated too often.

Therefore, compiling and studying your company’s analytics is a must-do activity. Your business needs to make a healthy profit to survive and keep employees working. Don’t wait until you have time, because emergencies and drains on your time will continue. Make time to begin analyzing your business today and you will reap the results going forward.

When training clients in pay-per-click management,  I often see the same costly error—mistaking conversions and sales for profit when determining budgets and maximum cost per click. Basing campaign success on conversions alone is not going to help unless these conversions are profitable. It’s important to understand and incorporate acceptable customer acquisition costs into campaign setup. Without doing so, every sale can chip away at profits.

In some instances profit isn’t the only metric that matters; sometimes it isn’t even critical. It’s important to understand the specific goals for your campaign and the associated success metrics. On occasion we have clients whose only goal is to be at the top of the results. Position is all that matters. Your budget is going to based around achieving top position, profit be damned.

Other clients first begin stating they want to maximize sales and mention metrics like highest traffic, most conversions, return on ad spend and highest profit margins. While certainly an achievable and sometimes desirable strategy, none of the metrics factor in overall profit. Traffic doesn’t equal conversions and conversions don’t necessarily equate to profit. Return on ad spend is tricky for newcomers to understand, especially those who have been bombarded by salespeople pushing return on ad spend as ROI. But return on ad spend only factors in sales-not profits from those sales.

For many a good place to begin is a strategy based around highest profit or for those to whom it’s relevant, lifetime value of the customer. You can choose highest profit within a set budget of go for all the profitable sales available. Cash flow considerations and length of sales cycle can help with these determinations. Determining goals and understanding your customer acquisition costs and lead conversion rates will save a lot of money and give you a better understanding of how pay-per-click can be used in future campaigns.

To maximize profit you’ll need to determine some customer acquisition benchmarks:

» What a new client is worth;

» Your gross profit

» Lifetime value of a customer

» % of that you’re willing to reinvest in marketing to acquire more

Next you’ll want to set some targets based on website behavior.

» What % of visitors take the desired action-e-mail, phone call, submit lead form etc.?

» How many that take that action actually become clients?

Now you can begin to make an ROI estimate based on profitable sales.

For example:

» Your average sale is $200.

» A customer makes on average 2 purchases a year.

» Your gross profit is 65%.

» Your gross profit dollars are $390 ( $195 per transaction x 2 transactions a years)

» Of the $390 in profit you are willing to invest 35% to acquire a new customer.

With this information you can determine a starting maximum cost per click.

Your maximum acquisition cost is your profit multiplied by the percentage you are willing to invest to acquire another customer. Multiply that by your conversion rate (visitors to customer, not leads) and you have a good starting pint to determine your maximum cost per click, one that doesn’t eat away at the profit goals you set.

In this case:

Conversion rate (2%) X % of gross profit willing to reinvest (35%) gives you a maximum cost per click total of 2.73.

Next get traffic and cost estimates. The operative word is estimates, they are not predictions!

Let’s say that for the keywords you’ve selected you can expect to get 500 clicks in one month and you have determined your conversion rate is 2%. If you don’t know what your conversion rate is be conservative and use 1%-1.5% until you have gathered some historical data.

If you receive 500 clicks at a maximum cost per click of $2.73 with a conversion rate of 2% you will have acquired 10 new customers at a cost of $1365. With an annual profit of $390 per customer these 10 new customers will return an annual profit of $3900 from your month’s investment.

Here we were focused solely on how to factor actual profits into bid costs. I haven’t address things like ad copy, keyword selections, the effect of ad position on CPC and conversion rates, bid management or other nuances of successful paid search marketing campaign management. Remember that paid search can get people to knock on your door but your website or landing page has to convert them to clients.

Next time we’ll discuss how minor improvements in conversion rates can yield major increase in profit and how you can achieve them.

Existing customers can be an ongoing source of profitable sales. If you’ve met your service promise and given them value, email marketing to existing customers can help make tough economic times a bit brighter—if you remember that permission based email is a relationship built on trust and expectations. Permission based email implies a promise. By sending only relevant, timely, personalized, valuable messages based on customer preferences you’ll have a much longer and profitable relationship.

Make a good first impression with a well crafted welcome message. Email marketers consistently discover that interest fades quickly. A strong welcome message reminds the customer of the reason he or she signed up to receive your communications in the first place. It also re-enforces your brand name recognition. The “From” line is a critical factor a customer considers when determining whether to open or delete and email. By seeing your name as soon as possible after signing up, they are apt to quickly recognize it again in the “From” line of your next message. This is also a perfect opportunity to recap what the subscriber can expect from you. If you deliver on this promise you’re apt to keep the subscriber engaged.

A lot of clients ask us if there is a “best time and day” to send emails. The answer is yes, but it is different for each subscriber. Tuesday morning is an often repeated suggestion but beware of blanket recommendations. We like to examine open dates and times of earlier messages to find patterns that are specific to our clients’ subscriber preferences. Whenever possible segmenting sends based on historical preferred open dates and times can result in a substantial lift in response rates.

List fatigue is a common problem. After a while customers stop responding to your promotions, Many don’t unsubscribe. So what is going on? Some are lurkers, waiting for aggressive promotions. Others just delete your message without opening them, often in a mass delete during inbox cleanups. You can re-engage these passive subscribers. We’ve had great success by segmenting these non-responders and surveying them to find out what’s changed. Are their needs different? Have they changed jobs? Moved? Those that respond often become re-engaged and turn out to be one of your more profitable segments.

Reaching out to non-responsive subscribers is also a great way to keep you list clean. Besides keeping delivery costs down you’ll get more accurate data by eliminating passive list clutter that can skew important metrics.

Remember to be persistent in building your email list. By replenishing your list with new subscribers, you’ll maintain a source of repeat business that can help get you through economic times like these.

The simple answer is no – search engine submission isn’t necessary. The majority of search engines nowadays (most notably Google) crawl and index pages by following links. Using that logic, a single inbound link from any already-indexed page will identify your page to the engine. Subsequently, if that page links to other pages within your site, they will also be indexed… and so on.

For this reason, inbound linking is very important. In fact, acquiring back-links may be the most important of SEO. In theory though, a website owner shouldn’t have to ’scout’ or ‘hunt’ for links. If the presented content is of interest, useful, and/or important, there is a natural tendency among web users to link to information. This is the basis for the Google PageRank algorithm.

With all due respect, submitting your site to the search engines can’t hurt. Plus, it only entails about 5 minutes of added work assuming you only submit to the big guys. And once is enough… you don’t need to submit your site more than once. It doesn’t help or get your site crawled any quicker or more often.

It should be noted that submitting your site to Google, Yahoo, MSN, and many others doesn’t cost a fee. Many SEO companies assert that you need to pay to be indexed. This isn’t the case and I would stay away from these companies. They are money hungry and aren’t looking out for your best interest.

Would you ever consider going on a vacation across the country without bringing a map? It is hard enough to find your way in some places with a map. How hard would it be if you tried this adventure without one? Yet, this is exactly what people do every single day in the online world. They tried to build their own businesses online without having a roadmap to success. Then, after months or years of just wandering around online, they give up in frustration and quit. They walk away saying that the Internet doesn’t work for them. The reason it didn’t work is that they didn’t pick up a map and follow it!

You don’t have to end up lost in the online shuffle. Below I will give you ten steps to help you map out your course and get you started in the right direction. It isn’t everything that you need to know by any stretch of the imagination, but it will give you a basic foundation to build upon.

Consider it your beginner’s map to Internet marketing profits.

1. Choose a targeted market

The biggest mistake most people make when starting a business is that they choose a product and then try to find people who want to buy it. If that is the direction you are starting from on your journey, then you are going the opposite direction from your destination. Wise businesses operate from a different concept. They pick a market first, and then they pick a product those people are searching for. In other words, instead of trying to find leads to sell their product to, they find targeted leads and then ask them what they are wanting to buy.

Don’t even consider starting a business until you know exactly where you are going to get your leads from. Think targeted customers first. Then, you can come up with a product for those individuals. Would you rather have 1,000 hits a day at your site of a general audience OR 10 hits a day of people who are desperate and willing to pay any price to buy your products? If you are smart, you will choose the people who are ready to buy!

2. Develop a Product

Next, you need to develop a product or service for this market. Don’t just jump on the bandwagon of affiliate programs when you come to this step. There are three major ways to selling a product online:

a. You create your own exclusive product.

This is the best opportunity you have. If you develop your own product, you can pick it’s price, sell reprint rights to others, set up an affiliate program, etc. Don’t tell me you can’t do this. Tens of thousands of innovative entrepreneurs have used their own information products to get their careers started. You can to.

Throughout your life, I am sure that there is something you have learned that you can share in a How-To product. Maybe you know someone else who has the right knowledge for a How-To product and you could offer to help them create a product if you both shared the rights to it. Don’t just jump past this opportunity and say it can’t be done.

b. You buy the rights to a product or you JV for an offline product.

You can buy the rights to successful products for $500 – $20,000. If someone else has created a product that you know your targeted market is interested in, offer them a large up-front fee for the rights to it. This way you can get your own product and never have to pay a penny in royalties. You can also search through magazines your targeted market reads and look for products people are selling. Then, give them a call and ask for the exclusive Internet rights to their product for a certain percentage of the profits or an up-front fee.

c. You join an affiliate program.

If you are just starting out online, this can be a good choice. You do have to keep in mind though that it doesn’t offer quite the profit potential that creating your own product or obtaining rights to one has.When choosing an affiliate program, make sure that it is something your targeted market cannot be without. They absolutely have to have it. Also pay special attention to the profits you receive from each sale.

If you are only be paid 5% commissions on the sales of $10 books, you will only be making 50 cents per customer. It would take 2,000 customers just to product $1,000 in profits. You cannot make money like this online! Look for higher priced products and higher commissions…especially commissions in the 25% or higher range.

3. Create a USP

Create a Unique Selling Position for your product or service. Too many companies are just trying to be me-too companies online. You cannot be just like the next guy and expect to make a profit in a global economy. Just going to the next guy’s web site to order is too easy for your customers.

You have to create a Uniqueness to your product or offer. What can you offer that no one else can? Can you offer better guarantees, better customer service, more technical support, faster shipping, or lower prices. Think of something that will set you apart from all of your online competitors and tell in complete detail what it is.

4. Pick a Domain Name and Hosting Service

The next step is to pick a domain name that describes your company, USP, and offer. Try to keep them as short and descriptive about your business as possible. Avoid using dashes or misspellings of your product. Both of these things will cause people to leave out part of your domain if they type it in. Someone else will be getting free traffic that you worked hard to obtain.

For hosting, I personally choose to use Virtualis since they have the Fastest customer service and technical support in the industry. Test them out. They will respond to you within the hour…anytime 24 hours a day. No other company I have ever been with has even come close!

5. Develop a Customer Friendly Site

The next step in the process is to develop your web site and put it up for the world to see. If you are planning to own a full-time Internet business, I recommend that you learn how to design the site yourself using one of dozens of programs which are readily available at any software store.

You will save so much money if you can do the work yourself on just the editing alone as your site grows. If your main business is offline and you are just adding a secondary income, then you may want to consider having a professional do your site for you.

When designing your site, keep the customer in mind always. Provide order forms for online credit card orders. Make all of the links easy to understand. Try to keep your site simple. Think like a customer, not the business owner.

Your customers are not nearly as interested in your business as you are. Make sure to put the benefits of your site and your USP right on top of the site. More than half of the web surfers never drop down past the first screen full of information. So, you have to give them the information they need as quickly as possible. The rules for any type of business are Benefits, Benefits, and more Benefits.

6. Offer a Freebie

One of the major keys to developing traffic and sales at your site is to always offer some type of freebie as a drawing factor. For example, I offer dozens of free reports, weather reports, news, and more. My greatest drawing factor throughout the past 8 months though has been the two free e-books which we offer on our site to people who subscribe to this newsletter.

You need to come up with a freebie no matter what type of business you are in. Create a free report and give it away. Add in a message board or some other type of CGI program on your site. Give a free demo of your software. Create something that you can give away for free on your site to draw in the visitors.

7. Start Your Own Opt-In List

Almost every full-time Internet marketer I know has developed their own Opt-in email list of some type. For most of them, it is a weekly newsletter they send out by email. For others, it may be a Tip of the Day. Other people might just have a list that they send out important updates to.

No matter what you choose to do, odds will be on your side if you concentrate on building a list of loyal email subscribers. Very rarely do customers purchase from you the first time they visit your site. Most of them will get on your list, hang out for a few weeks or months, and then they buy from you. They have to get to know you before they are willing to spend their money with you.

I have found that the most effective leads come from offline advertising. For example, you could purchase ads in a popular targeted magazine for your business. You could also purchase a postcard in one of the card decks. Start up a co-op and get 10 other people to advertise with you and run your own ads for free. Offline leads which come to your site often turn out to contain a much higher percentage of buyers than any of the online advertising methods.
Once you put our short 10 step outline together you have a basic map to creating your own Internet success story. You wouldn’t consider going on a trip without a map. So don’t try to go it alone online without a map.
Terry Dean’s Brand New Fr-e eBook, “10 Quick and Easy Ways to Increase Profits to ANY Web Site Overnight!” Reveals More Time Tested Proven Internet Marketing Secrets Than 99% of the Paid Products Available…Showing You Step-By-Step How to Increase Your Traffic, Drop Your Expenses, and Drive Your Profits Through the Roof