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What Does Grass Cutting Got To Do With Business?

Lesley Johnston — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:44:05 +0000

Over the weekend the weather was extra hot and unfortunately rain was forecast for Sunday and the rest of the week. Determined to get my grass cut before it rained and grew even longer, I put everything aside that I’d planned to get the grass cut. What, you may very well ask, does this have to do with business?

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, there will be tasks that you put off until the last minute in preference to the parts of your business you love so that eventually they get so overdue that you have to do them. If these tasks are directly related to increasing your business sales and profits then perhaps you need to make time to do them more often.

Also, as soon as you start cutting grass you see an immediate improvement. It’s a shame that business results aren’t always so instantaneous and that can often mislead us into thinking that certain tasks aren’t giving us a return on our time. This is why testing and measuring your results are so important in business so that you can see whether the actions you carry out within your business are having a positive or negative effect on your business. You can do this very easily by creating monthly (or more frequently) profit and loss statements, tracking the number of sales you get, the amount of each sale, how many customers you have, how many products you are selling and in what quantities.

Your website can also be a great source for tracking and measuring your results and you can do this simply by installing tracking software such as Google Analytics. By tracking where your web visitors are coming from, you can focus more on the ways that are sending you the most traffic (so long as it’s converting traffic), what your visitors are buying and if they are leaving your sales funnel, where they are leaving and be able to do something about it.

Finally, imagine a garden with long grass (I’d of added a picture but my grass is cut!) and now imagine that some of the grass has been cut – does the picture look complete? Does it give you a good impression of the garden? No! The same is with your business practises and systems, half finished systems and tasks make your business look messy. Go back to the garden and visualise the grass all cut and the edges trimmed, now see the difference. Not only do you feel a huge sense of accomplishment and pride when your garden is looking good like this and it probably took you less time than you thought right? The same principals can be transferred to your business. The more attention you give to your business to make it look and run better, the bigger the rewards.

Now there will be those who say they outsource their gardening and get in a gardener and the same can be said for your business too, you can outsource many of the tasks within it. However, unless you know what you want the garden to look like (end result) and the tasks needed to get it that way, how can you outsource any of these tasks?

Well my garden was taken care off this weekend, now this week I need to take better care of my business!

Keyword Selection – Are You Targeting the Right Keywords?

Lesley Johnston — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:15:55 +0000

As we all know, in order to get search engine traffic we need to target the right keywords. Recently I’ve come across a few websites who are targeting many keywords that they don’t have a hope in ever getting traffic for, yet they insist that these are the keywords they want to target. Therefore this post aims to help those who perhaps aren’t sure about choosing the right keywords for their website so you can make a better informed choice about the keywords you go after. This is only step 1!

For my keyword research I always start by using Market Samurai which, for me, saves me time using multiple applications and lets me filter the information down into only keywords and data that I’ll use. They have a free version that you can sign up for by clicking on the link above. I’ll be doing more trainings using Market Samurai so grab it now to get your questions at the ready!

In order to get search engine traffic your website really needs to be on the first page of results on Google. The breakdown of click throughs from search engine results are roughly:

Position #1 - 42%
Position #2 - 12%
Position #3 - 8%
Position #4 - 6%
Position #5 - 5%
Position #6 - 4%
Position #7 - 3% (just over)
Position #8 - 3% (almost bang on)
Position #9 - 3% (just under)
Position #10 – 3% (a little bit more under)

Here you can see the first page results on Google get approximately 89% of the search engine traffic, therefore if you are targetting keywords that have competition, the chances are that without doing lots of offsite seo work on that keyword, you won’t receive traffic for that keyword.

So what can you do?

Well you could take out all your keywords in your keywords section and let the search engines pick what they think your page should be ranked for. Which is often what the search engines do anyway. Also by having your keywords mentioned in the keywords section all your competitor has to do to view what keywords you want to be ranked for is click “view source” and then copy and paste them for their own campaigns. Of course you can always use this information to your advantage too!

However, this still doesn’t address the problem about picking keywords that you can get indexed for. The answer is of course, long tail keywords. What this means is that instead of targeting large market keywords such as:

internet marketing, dog training, coaching, work from home, virtual assistant, diets

You start to look for longer keywords or alternative keywords that still have a good amount of searches but with less competition. In order to find relative keywords for my projects I use Market Samurai where I enter the main keyword that is highly competitive and it gives me a list of 200 long tail and related keywords that I can then find out how many people are searching for each keyword per day, and how many competing pages there are. All in just a few clicks of a mouse! This has saved me hours of research.

This has just been a quick overview and something to think about when choosing your target keywords. I’ll be writing more about this subject shortly so stay tuned.

Remember there are 3 types of traffic – Direct, Referral AND Search Engine traffic, and you should always have a mixture of those coming to your website.

Article Submitter Software – Why Use It?

Lesley Johnston — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:29:18 +0000

Article submission software has been around for a while and I’ve seen comments that it’s used by spammers, it’s a waste of time or it’s better to manually submit your articles. As my time is valuable, as is yours, I decided to test a very affordable article submitter to see what the results were.

For this experiment I tested ArticleBot, like the guy from Remmington, I liked it so much I bought the resell rights to it!

What is does is allow you to automate your article submissions to article directories that are built on a similar platform. You can read this to mean that they are probably article directories that have been set up to earn the owner some adsense income! Don’t think this is a bad thing because most of these directories will give you some good “link juice” back to your website which is a good thing.

Unfortunately patience is not my strong point so setting up each of the accounts did take time. I used a gmail email account that I had set up for this particular website, to keep everything all in one place. As of today there are 353 article directories that you can submit your article to automatically, however I decided to be a bit more choosy than that. Also, I found a few had been hacked by a hacker so obviously didn’t register for these accounts!

What I liked about it was that you can set up some accounts with your username and password for some article directories and then later on you can add a few more. It keeps track of the articles that you’ve submitted to which directories.

There is also a built-in basic article spinner in it, so that you can edit some of the words in your title, body etc. I decided not to use this feature but instead just entered about 5 different titles for the article, as well as 5 different resource boxes to mix things up a bit. You can also add different bodies of your articles too, but as I wanted to get to the end results, this time I didn’t bother. There seems to be quite a debate about how much “duplicate content” hurts your rankings and also what exactly is deemed “duplicate content” but that debate will need to wait for another post!

Once I was ready I submitted my article in batches to the directories, filling in any captcha as I went along. For this purpose it’s good to batch all the directories needing captcha confirmation in one sitting – yes the software does this for you! From entering my article and submitting it to around 90 directories it took me just over 30 minutes.

My conclusion? If I can write an article and submit it to 90 article directories using this article submitter software in about 30 minutes, when it would take me that time to manually submit 4 or 5, I’m going to keep using it. What I will say is that I am using these directories for backlink purposes. For the main directories such as EzineArticles, GoArticles and ArticlesBase I take more time over my submissions and always submit them manually.

The best part of ArticleBot is that it’s only $24.95 for the software and that includes updates. I figured that my time was worth at least that much!

Get your copy here and let me know how you get on: ArticleBot

$7 Script – A Review

Lesley Johnston — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:34:12 +0000

I’ve been using a $7 script for several smaller projects and I absolutely love the simplicity of it, as well as the results! So what is the $7 script and what can it do for your business?

Basically it provides you with a complete sales system, including product delivery, affiliate program and security, not to mention the option to include a one time offer to your sales process all for the pricely sum of $7! This is a system that you can use over and over again, as many times as you like.

There are various ways you can use the $7 script, this includes using the sales page as a giveaway offer, where you offer a free product, such as a report, audio or video in return for your visitors email address therefore building your mailing list (a huge must for anyone with an internet business).

Then you can add a one time offer (OTO) that relates to the initial offer for a nominal price and increase your profits at the same time.

Another way to use the initial sales page, is by actually selling $7 reports from it. Novel idea I know! Infact, it doesn’t have to be $7, it can be any price you choose. Again you can add a one time offer to this process as well.

One of the great things about the $7 script is the product delivery system. When a customer buys your offer, or signs up for your free offer, the script will also, upon receipt of payment via Paypal, automatically deliver your product to your customer. If they also buy your one time offer, they will also get a link automatically, to download this purchase as well.

Lastly, there is the inbuilt affiliate program. It’s pretty basic in structure but it’s very effective. As you are using this script to primarily build your mailing list, you can offer customers and/or your mailing list the option of earning a commission for promoting your product. The majority of the time you will offer 100% commissions for those promoting your offer, afterall they are driving buying visitors to your mailing list who may very well be interested in other products and services that you sell.

If you have a few digital products that you are looking for a way to sell them, with a very limited budget you can’t go wrong with investing $7 in the $7 script. It’s very simple to set up, complete with page templates.

To get your copy of the $7 script click here.

List of Article Directories

Lesley Johnston — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:06:22 +0000

There is no point having an article marketing challenge if there aren’t any article directories to submit articles to! Here are a list of article directories that may be of use to you. I’ll add to it as I come across other article directories that I’ve missed.

Here are the initial list of 30 article directories.

Submit to each of these directories and find out which ones drive the most traffic to your website for the same keyword.

1888Articles.com

ABCArticleDirectory.com

ArticleCompilation.com

ArticleOnlineDirectory.com

FreeUniqueArticles.com

PLR Articles – What Are PLR Articles and How Can I Use Them

Lesley Johnston — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:25:41 +0000

PLR articles are articles that have been written by an author and instead of keeping the copyright for these articles themselves, they are selling the copyright to the articles, or giving them away with private label rights, allowing others to put their name to the article as the original author, quite legally.

When you buy PLR articles you need to be aware that you are not the only person to have received these articles so you need to edit them in some way before use. The more widespread the articles, the more you should edit them to put your own spin on it. Often business owners find it easier to edit articles than actually write them from scratch and plr gives you this advantage.

You can always outsource the editing of your private label rights articles too.

There are different quality plr content, namely those which have a limited distribution e.g. only 100 packs will ever be sold. These are usually of higher quality and will have less competition for each article as you can bet that many who buy the same plr article pack as yourself will not do anything with it!

Again, you should always edit them to make sure that your article is unique and isn’t an exact duplicate of others who buy the package and use it without doing any editing to it. You will also find that although you can edit the articles in any way you wish and even sell on your edited version, you can not sell on the private label rights to the package you’ve just bought. This is what makes your package more exclusive and therefore more valuable.

The other type are plr content with no restrictions and with mass distribution, where you may find the same bundle of articles on many different plr selling websites, with lots of people editing and using the same content and claiming to be the author. These articles still have value and can be used very successfully, you just need to choose carefully where you use them.

There are lots of different uses for plr content, these include using them for website and blog content, which can save you lots of time without having to think up new topics to write about, you are already half way finished by using plr articles. Many use plr articles for creating Squidoo lens and Hubpage content, or for building up an autoresponder series, you can also add a few plr articles together to create a report that you can either giveaway on your website to new subscribers or to sell for a profit.

Although using plr articles is a great time saving strategy, remember that if you are putting your name to that content, you must think about your online reputation. Don’t put your name to content that hasn’t been edited, nor would tarnish your reputation as a business professional.

There are countless ways to use plr articles to help grow your business and increase your online profits, the only real limitation is with your imagination and time available.

Article Marketing – Jan 2010 Challenge Update

Lesley Johnston — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:29:42 +0000

It’s funny how all the best laid plans seem to get changed, almost as soon as they are made! I’ve created a few articles but have held back from publishing them until I get a few more things in place. I’ve decided to create articles in the same niche to submit them to different article directories to see which ones are the most effective. They will all be pointing to the same webpage, to test the effects of article marketing.

One of the reasons I’ve been kicked off course slightly (ok I was sidetracked!) was with the thought about using plr articles. I began wondering if, when I was writing so many articles, whether I could monetize them in another way, other than just using them for traffic generation. Therefore, I am going to be packaging up a few of the articles I’ve already written and putting them into plr packages to sell, rather than use them to submit to article directories.

I’m just wondering how many income streams I can create during 2010 and if it’s only taking me a day or 2 to create new ones for my business then there could be quite a few!

New article directories are appearing every day and different people have different preferences to which article directory is their favourite, so I’ll be listing a list of all the article directories I could find, as well as my top 5.

As with everything online, things are taking longer than I would like and I’m sure outsourcing many of these steps would both save me time and money in the long run, however, until I have my own article marketing strategy that works, I’ll be doing things myself. Perhaps it’s the wrong call but I won’t know until I actually put it into practise and then test both.

Many of the article sections in any article directory have huge competition so how does a newbie to article marketing make a splash? Does keyword research play a part? Does marketing the article really matter?

I’m almost ready to start submitting articles, as well as releasing my special report – which now is a free plr article package that I’ll be giving away. In my research into plr articles, I’ve found there is a huge difference between those which are sold with resell rights (you can then sell the plr articles to others) and those with limited distribution, which are obviously more expensive.

As well as taking part in this article marketing challenge, I’m still running my internet home business and building different income streams, therefore I’m sure my results will be different from those who solely focus on article marketing for a month. However, if you are like me and wearing many hats and juggling home, business and motherhood then there is hope!

Article Marketing – January 2010 Monthly Challenge

Lesley Johnston — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:30:48 +0000

Yes, Article Marketing is going to be my first challenge of 2010. I’ve used article marketing before, for a variety of my sites in the past to differing degrees of success. What I’ve started to realise is that there is no point writing an article and submitting it to an article directory if you don’t have a strategy behind your article. Yes, even if you have a nice little resource box at the bottom of your article, with a link back to the home page of your domain, this does not mean you have a strategy!

Not only do I want to test out how effective different article directories are for submissions, but also a few other strategies as well.

1. Does keywords really matter in an article?

2. Does marketing your article with web 2.0 properties work better than keyword marketing?

3. Does having really focused niche articles work better? As I wasn’t quite clear in what I meant by this I thought I should explain it – is it better to write 30 articles on a variety of subjects or is it better to write 30 articles on one subject? Which would bring the most amount of traffic and ultimately conversions? Does it matter?

4. How effective is article spinning software? Should it be used?

5. What about plr articles? Is it worth paying a few dollars for plr articles or should you write them yourself?

6. Is there a system to article marketing? If so, what is the most effective system.

As you can see I do have quite a few questions about article marketing that I want to answer. There are lots of people out there who say – article marketing is great, and I would agree – however in 2010, I want to know exactly WHY it’s so great, and if I can create an article marketing system for my business so that I can then use that system to both automate and increase my online profits then I want to figure this out asap.

The whole point of running a business is to make money. If the activities we do within our business don’t make us money, what’s the point of doing these activities. They should be either directly or indirectly putting money into our bank account.

With article marketing it will be indirectly, as you either direct those who read your article to either a free report you’ve written, related to the article and capture their email address so that you can then repeatedly contact them at later dates, or you can send them directly to your sales page. Which do you think works best? Me too, a free report!

So day 1, I’m creating my free report to give away in my chosen niche and setting up the capture page and autoresponder on my website (for this purpose I am going to be using this website). I’m using GetResponse for this, although you can use Aweber. These seem to be the most popular email marketing softwares available. I’m also finding 5 to 10 article directories to submit my articles to, that I’ll add here tomorrow.

Accountability

Lesley Johnston — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:16:12 +0000

There is nothing like being held publicly accountable for making me take the extra steps and really push myself forward to achieving the goals I set myself. I’m determined to make 2010 my best year yet, for all aspects of my life. Yes, I am dragging myself away from being a workaholic to having a more balanced life. What that looks like at the moment, I haven’t a clue, but I’m sure my daughter will have some shopping plans in there somewhere with me!

I’m all for working smarter and multi-tasking so I’ll be taking a marketing tactic each month and focusing purely on that tactic for the entire month. The fine details still need to be figured out, but there is no point giving something a half hearted effort or having a scattered approached (looks sheepishly at the floor) so I want to see what effect 12 months of focused effort to ONE marketing tactic can make to my business, as well as to see which marketing tactics work the best.

Although I’ve picked up lots of different tips and strategies over the years, I still have a huge yearning to learn more, and more, and more about internet marketing and what strategies you can use to improve your chances of running a successful online business. However, now I am learning then APPLYING. This makes a huge difference to your results – sounds simple but how many tactics do you learn about, think how great they would be for your business then NOT apply it? Unfortunately lots of the theory I had learned, turned out not to be so great in implementation while others I loosely tested turned out to give a great result, so focused more on those.

My biggest passion is learning something and then passing that knowledge on to others, well the bits that work anyway! So each month I will be producing a case study on each internet marketing strategy. You can try this yourself. Pick a strategy, monitor and document your progress then sell the product (if/when you are successful).

2010 is a year for focused action and big thinking. What can you achieve during 2010?

Creating A REAL Online Business

Lesley Johnston — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:17:59 +0000

As you may have read already on The Business Mum website that I’ve been online for too many years without making a profit and unfortunately there are probably more people in that situation at the moment than there are, who are making a really good living. So what makes the difference? What differentiates those who are failing online with those who are succeeding?

For years I kidded myself that because I had a website and some traffic to my site, joined a few business networking groups that I was running a business. I was focused on discussing business with people, helping them out and I figured once I’d build a reputation I’d maybe sell them something later on. Does this sound like a real business to you? No, but at the time I would have argued til I was blue in the face that I was a business woman and I was running a real business.

One giveaway that I was kidding myself was when I was doing my financial accounts. I used to do them at the last minute, so they were always at least a year behind. Why bother, when I wasn’t making any money or doing many sales – just create them at the last minute to the tax office and I’d be ok. Again, does this sound like a real business to you? Does this sound familiar?

Can you imagine Microsoft or any of the so-called online gurus behaving this way? Not on your life! They know up to date figures, they know that every day they are going to get x new subscribers and when they release a new product or push an affiliate product they will receive $x within a certain period of time. They know exactly what their profits are, what their actual sales and expenses to date are. Sound boring to you? Well it did to me too as I wanted to focus on the fun stuff, chatting with friends on Skype or Yahoo Messenger about business, and because I was chatting about business, I was busy in my business right? Or I would be revamping a website, or creating an ebook that never seemed to get finished.

What I realised was that if I wanted others to take me and my business seriously and start making money, then I had to start taking my business seriously and acting as though it was successful. Rather than thinking, well when I start making money then I will track and measure my results, I’ll get my accounts up to date, I’ll create a business plan that can tell me what I need to do to get to where I want to be in my business.

When I took off my rose coloured glasses, I realised things weren’t quite so rosy. It’s a bit like the film The Matrix. Do you take the blue pill or the red pill?

Taking off those glasses was the best thing I’ve done for my business. 2010 is going to be my best year yet because I’ve planned for it. Can you say the same? If you want help, then I’m here. I’ve been there, not done that and can help!