<![CDATA[Undisclosed affiliate selling – how to spot it]]></h1> <article> <h1>Undisclosed affiliate selling – how to spot it</h1> <p>2010-01-08T00:21:50Z</p> <p>Hi Marshall and Gary here</p> <p>Life is pretty hectic here at <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong>. It is amazing the number of <strong>small businesse</strong>s that we come into help who do not have a website, or have a very poorly optimised website, or are having the most cost inefficient Adwords campaign run that you have ever seen. These are generally a symptom of not having an <strong>internet strategy </strong>and doing things piecemeal.</p> <p>Anyway, today it is about <strong>affiliate selling online</strong>. As you are probably aware, affiliate selling would be one of the biggest drivers in the growth of the internet. The fact that so many products today are available digitally mean that the owners of the products are happy to pay away large commissions to sell their product. This is because once produced, the cost to provide the product is quite often only the bandwidth to download it. In fact, most internet courses (you know – make $5,000 a week from home for 4 hours work) recommend that you do not deal with products that pay less than 60% commission. Many internet marketing based offerings pay at 75% – have a look at <a href="http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm" target="_blank">http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm</a> and search the internet category.</p> <p><span id="more-820"></span></p> <p>Yes – when someone buys a $67 product online, generally the affiliate will get $45 and the product owner $22. The product owner is happy because there may be 100 affiliates selling the product, the affiliates are happy because they are making good money. No problems – the affiliate is normally not disclosed here. And because the purchaser is not paying any more to buy through the affiliate than if they bought direct, no-one loses (although you could mount an argument that all affiliate products are overpriced to allow for affiliate commission).</p> <p>When you market as an affiliate to a list, the question of disclosure becomes a bit trickier. If you have created your own list through your own marketing activities, you have every right to affiliate sell to them and undisclosed. Provided the product price is not loaded, the people on the list who buy the product are not disadvantaged.</p> <p>When you are a member of a body (professional, industry, network, etc), the answer, to us at <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong> at least, becomes much clearer. To offer affiliate products to this list without disclosing the fact that you may make money from it is pretty unethical. Just because you have a commonality to other people through a professional or other association does not make them fair game to profit from!</p> <p>Without exception, the message through the list from the affiliate seller is about how great the product is and how you have to use it. Whilst the product indeed may be as good as promoted, the question mark is inevitably – “do they really think it is a great product, or do they really like earning the commission?”. Unfortunately, you never know because you do not even know that they are affiliate selling – unless they disclose it.</p> <p>So, if they choose not to disclose it, how can you tell if it is an affiliate sale? It can be tricky, but here are a few hints to look for:</p> <ol> <li> Half the time the nature of the communication gives it away. If it talks about internet opportunities, great value, limited time offer, I have searched and found this great product, etc – it is a fair chance that this is affiliate selling.</li> <li> The affiliate has to put a URL link in the communication. The not so internet savvy affiliate may just use the link that the affiliate program provides. We saw one of these recently like www.thewelloffhaffiliate.com/?A_BID=Qq8PCpaD. The code after the forward slash is their affiliate code. Pretty obvious when you know what to look for.</li> <li> The next level up is where a masking URL is used like TinyURL. TinyURL and similar products are great, we use it ourselves all the time. It turns a long and ugly URL into a neat short and unique URL to click on. However, if you look at <a href="http://www.tinyurl.com" target="_blank">www.tinyurl.com</a> you will see a suggested use is that “your affiliate link will be hidden from the visitor..”. This is harder to spot, but keep a close eye on the bottom left of your internet browser and see if when the destination site is found, does a list of numbers or letters like in “/ADQ1342KZ” flick pass. If so, you can bet your bottom dollar that it is an affiliate link.</li> <li> When the URL in the communication takes you to an innocuous looking site and there is no forward slash at the end of the URL, chances are it is a sales page. These are designed to get your name and email address to push market to. Hover your mouse over the “click here to sign up” banner. Then look down to the bottom left of your browser – again you may see a URL. If it has the giveaway “/promo/gj123″ or similar, it is an affiliate sale – again. Or at worse, just click on the link and watch the bottom left hand corner.</li> <li> While we are looking at the bottom left hand corner – anything that flashes pass like Clickbank, Clixgalore, CommissionJunction or the like – definitely an affiliate sales as these sites are basically a clearing house for affiliate programs and sales</li> <li> Lastly – repetition of similar email messages. A lot of internet marketing based affiliate programs have a launch date and a close date. Communication tends to ramp up to the launch date and the message becomes a little more assertive like “don’t miss this one in a lifetime opportunity”, “how amazing the opportunity is”, “no brainer”, etc.</li> </ol> <p>A final point on all this. Many internet marketing affiliate sales process have the ubiqitious “free offer” up front. You can accept sign up for this without having to pay anything. You will undoubtedly then be led to another sales page offering the best deal ever where you only pay $67 but get $4,946 of value. Buy this, the affiliate gets their 50/60/70% commission. Alternatively it is a free 30 day subscription and then $27 a month thereafter. If you don’t buy it, you will be on another mailing list until you unsubscribe.</p> <p>We have seen a recent offer where although the free offer was significant, if you read the affiliate program blurb, it had 14 ways to earn income (or monetise in internet speak) the free offering. This again leads to the question – are they helping you via the free offer or are they profiting from you by using the free offer as the hook to get you in to then monetise you 14 different ways?</p> <p>When should someone disclose that they are an affiliate – <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong> will leave you to be the judge of this but at least you now have a few tools to spot it.</p> <p>Your business buddies</p> <p>Marshall and Gary</p> <p>PS We do have affiliate sales offers, those on the side of this page are exactly this like BlueHost and Aweber. But they have no loaded cost and we do not sell to any professional network, just those who take our recommendations for what they are – the best value we can find online.</p> </article> <article> <h1>The free offers that cost you</h1> <p>2010-01-08T00:22:45Z</p> <p> </p> <p>Hi, Marshall and Gary here</p> <p>One of the reasons we run the <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong> blog is that there are many people in the <strong>internet marketing</strong> space that want to make you an offer too good to refuse. But as the saying goes “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is!”. One example we look at here is whether a high search engine ranking for an article with the rarely searched keyword combination of <strong>Marketing for Online Business A Marketing Business Secret</strong> will really assist your business.</p> <p>We believe that our blog offers unbiased and sensible information and advice that can really benefit <strong>small business owners</strong>, <strong>business consultants</strong> and anyone wanting to use the internet for commercial purposes. Have a read though our older posts – you will hopefully learn a few useful internet concepts.</p> <p>By far the most common “great” offers we see revolve around 2 themes:</p> <ol> <li>Get your website built for free; and</li> <li>Let me drive huge amounts of traffic to your website by achieving high Google search engine rankings.</li> </ol> <p>We have no problem with these offers – when all is as it seems and clearly laid out – but it rarely is.</p> <p><strong>Offer # 1: Get a free website built <br /> </strong></p> <p><span id="more-805"></span></p> <p>Let’s have a look at the first one – one recent offer we have seen offers to build you a free 10 page website. Built in an SEO friendly CMS we are told. Who is driving the strategies of keyword research, titles, meta descriptions, URL naming, product segmentation based on keyword strategy, etc which will get good search engines rankings is not mentioned. But we probably agree for many businesses, a website with poor SEO & strategy is better than none – as long as people understand what they are getting.</p> <p>There is no such thing as a free lunch. The sting comes with the hosting of the website. This particular offer had a range of hosting options, the cheapest being around US$500 a year with 2 email accounts (not sure what business nowadays runs on only 2 email accounts) for a 2 year deal. That is a commitment of just shy of US$1,000 for a “free” website – interesting economics. To get the princely number of 5 email accounts, the cost almost doubles.</p> <p>We like BlueHost in the US for hosting where possible (like .com, .net, etc). They charge US$6.95 a month or around US$85 a year, give you the first domain registration free, allow 2,500 email accounts, have unlimited transfers and best of all let you have unlimited domain names (and websites) hanging off the one hosting package. And have a free website building tool if you feel that way inclined. In short – this is awesome value. This is why we are affiliate sellers of BlueHost and we use them as well. We have about 8 websites hanging off our US$85 a year hosting package (you do have to pay to register other domains – which are very cheap).</p> <p>According to our <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong> maths, over 2 years this leaves around US$800 to build a website for the same cost as the free website offer. We have many associates who will knock up a SEO friendly 4 to 6 page site for around US$300 (we are talking about your basic “have an online presence” type site – nothing fancy). Using an outsourced service like Odesk is even cheaper.</p> <p>We think we know where the better value lies – but value is always in the eye of the beholder. We just worry that the beholder does not know what to look for when assessing value.</p> <p>Make sure that you have a look around at what hosting packages really cost for your preferred domain before committing to the “free” website offer.</p> <p><strong>Offer #2: We will get you lots of Google #1 (plus #2, #3, etc) rankings for you</strong></p> <p>At <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong> we have banged on about this quite a bit. But it always seems that there is someone else around the corner ready to make outrageous Google ranking claims.</p> <p>One ridiculous claim we have seen from a supposed expert is “look how I dominate the Google rankings for my name!” – presented as evidence of capacity to get rankings. Well search Google for “Marshall Vann” and you will see lots of listings for me as well, particularly for Australian based searches. Have I optimised myself? No, just had a sufficiently public life to gather lots of references on the web.</p> <p>The next one is getting a fistful of rankings in Google for really obscure keywords. Our favourite is the #1 ranking for – wait for it – “<strong>Marketing for Online Business A Marketing Business Secret</strong>“. And the ranking is for an article, not a website. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, when you do a quick Google Keyword Tool analysis for this long. long tail keyword – the result is “not enough data”. For those who have used GKT, you will know that this is Google’s polite way of saying “there are no searches being done around the world for this keyword or phrase”. So great, it ranks #1 for something absolutely no-one is searching for (other than maybe the author) – even better, it also ranks #4 (woo hoo!).</p> <p>So are we getting our knickers in a knot over this. Yes. They want people to pay for this service! It is rubbish. A #1 ranking for unsearched keywords does not help your business, does not drive traffic to your site, in fact, does nothing of any note other than make someone else a bit richer and you a bit poorer. </p> <p>We have seen these strategies offered as a free service as well. The trick here is to take some obscure keyword (again) and get it ranking #1 for you (well, normally an article that may have some passing relevance to your business). Then having proven the supposed knowledge of SEO, proceed to charge for a raft of subsequent (and useless) #1 ranking keyword articles.</p> <p><strong>However</strong>, don’t get us wrong. Article submission strategies are great for building strong and plentiful backlinks to a website. If the article ranks highly for well searched keywords, even better. So when people search for the keyword (and you know they are because you have done the research on GKT or elsewhere), find your article, click through, read it and then click on the hyperlink in the article to your website – great and proven strategy. Get the link in the article, not just at the end – these are called contextual links and really help with your own web page PageRank.</p> <p><strong>So what to do?</strong></p> <p>So what is the lesson here? Please don’t rely on claims made by others peddling something that may or may not be of value to you but is of value to them. Do your homework. Use blogs and sites like Small Business Internet Marketing or the hundreds of other really good and informative ones to make informed decisions.</p> <p>Once you have the knowledge, make the decision. The apparently quick and easy way may cost you a lot more than you think.</p> <p>Your business buddies</p> <p>Marshall and Gary</p> </article> <article> <h1>Beware of the reciprocal link merry-go-around</h1> <p>2010-01-08T00:25:08Z</p> <p>Hi, Marshall and Gary here</p> <p>Here at <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong>, we are members or associates of quite a few different professional and accreditation bodies. So we get to see a lot of communications and offers that flow around.</p> <p>One that seems to be getting a lot of airtime in many organisations is the pushing of <strong>reciprocal links</strong>. Inevitably, the message starts off with something like “Improve your Google ranking” and then goes onto to offer an exchange of reciprocal links. Whilst we have nothing against reciprocal links as part of a well thought out <strong>internet strategy</strong>, we have a sneaking suspicion that most people do not quite understand how they work.</p> <p>One of our earlier posts had a long and detailed explanation about the <strong>Google PageRank</strong> formula – see <a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/search-engines-and-seo/how-googles-pagerank-fits-in/">How Googles PageRank fits in</a>. If you follow the maths, it is obvious that links from higher PageRank pages will definitely help with your web pages PageRank. </p> <p>But a couple of very important things seem to get overlooked in the rush for reciprocal links:</p> <p><span id="more-801"></span></p> <ol> <li>Google gives a PageRank to every web page. So make sure that you get all your <strong>backlinks </strong>pointing at the page that you want to increase its ranking. This may or may not be the Home page. Often, you may want it to be a product or services or sales page. You should know this before offering any reciprocal links.</li> <li>Backlinks from web pages with a PageRank of 0 are nigh on useless in helping your PageRank. Be careful, many times the Home page of the site backlinking to your site may have the good PageRank, but the backlink comes from another “Links” page with a PageRank of 0.</li> <li>If you own a web page that has a decent PageRank, you only have so much “link juice” to use. Use it wisely and don’t just use backlinks as a simple strategy – you will be giving away far more than you get most likely. The more links out to other sites, the less worth your PageRank is to those sites.</li> <li>The placement of a backlink is very important as well. One link in a veritable sea of random links is not of much value – I am certain we have all seen the Links page with an amazingly eclectic range of links. Google values “contextual” links far more highly, particualrly if the anchor text over the hyperlink is relevant to the page that it is on.</li> </ol> <p>So, to paraphrase a well known saying, please beware of Greeks bearing links.</p> <p>You need to have a clearly thought out <strong>link strategy</strong> that incorporates all these matters rather than a random asking of everyone to do reciprocal link with your website. We use our useful links section sparingly here at <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong> – and so should you.</p> <p>Your business buddies</p> <p>Marshall and Gary</p> </article> <article> <h1>Who’s Joined LinkedIn</h1> <p>2010-01-08T00:26:02Z</p> <p>Hi, Gary and Marshall here,</p> <p>With the growing popularity of the business and professional social networking site <a title="LinkedIn" href="http://www.linkedin.com"><u>LinkedIn</u></a>, it was only a matter of time before another powerhouse of the web2.0 world joined forces and integrated their services.</p> <p>We’re talking about the <a title="WordPress LinkedIn Application" href="http://www.linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_ch_panel_id=1&_applicationId=2200"><u>WordPress application</u></a> for LinkedIn. With the WordPress App, you can now sync your latest WordPress blog post and all its content with your LinkedIn profile. This means you can keep everyone linked to your profile up to date with your latest business ventures.</p> <p>Once you’ve loaded this WordPress App. you can filter your posts with a special LinkedIn tag and even display your personal WordPress Gravatar (global avatar) with updates sent automatically to your entire LinkedIn network.</p> <p><span id="more-779"></span></p> <p>It is a quick and easy process to install this application. Simply log in to your LinkedIn account and look for the menu options box on the left hand side. </p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/applications.png"></a></p> <p>Click on Applications to expand the selection. The Featured Applications page will load and you need to look around for the WordPress Logo. </p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/wordpress.png"></a></p> <p>Click on the WordPress link and you will be directed to the WordPress Applications page. Simply click on Add application and enter your blog URL and you are away.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/install.png"></a></p> <p>As easy as that. Now when you publish to your WordPress blog, your posts will appear as excerpts on your LinkedIn profile.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/wordpresslist.png"></a></p> <p>Now if you don’t have a WordPress blog already set up then it’s your lucky day. All you need to do to get started is enter your name and email address in the box at the top right hand side of this page and gain instant access to our easy step by step blog building guide <em><strong>eProfit Formula</strong></em>. It’s absolutely FREE and will have you up and blogging in no time.</p> <p>If you don’t have a profile set up yet, join the millions of professionals networking online and join <a title="LinkedIn" href="http://www.linkedin.com"><u>LinkedIn</u></a> today.</p> <p>if you want to keep up to date with all things at Small Business Internet Marketing on LinkedIn, then get connected and <a title="Join our LinkedIn Network" href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/gary-weis/9/aa7/2b6"><u>join our network here</u></a>.</p> <p>Until next time</p> <p>Gary and Marshall</p> </article> <article> <h1>How to Get Free Traffic</h1> <p>2010-01-08T00:27:07Z</p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.fwebtraffic.com/?rid=1256820"> </a></p> <h2 style="text-align: center;">“IT CAN’T BE TRUE?”</h2> <h2 style="text-align: center;">Read on and find out!</h2> <p>I’m still shaking my head in disbelief. As we’ve said many times before here at Small Business Internet Marketing, we constantly use our own sites as crash test dummies for many of the latest online marketing techniques. We also put ourselves through hours, weeks and sometimes months testing the barrage of new products that hit the market. More often than not we trash most of them as quickly as we initiate them and put it down to good ole testing for the cause.</p> <p>However, we’re glad to report to you a web traffic technique that is working an absolute treat. As usual we’re fairly sceptical of any product or service that can claim they will send you 1 million (yes that’s 1,000,000) FREE visitors to your site in as little as 30 days…. Yeah RIGHT we thought. </p> <p>I was almost ready to hit the delete button when I thought…. Ah what the heck…. give it a go….. I’ve got a spare five minutes. Well…. I’m here to tell you, I’m glad I decided to push on a give this program a go because its kicking butt.</p> <p>Now before we all get overly excited, we have not yet received our GUARANTEED 1,000,000 visitors and nor have we increased our sales by 4000%. What I can tell you though is we are not only experiencing significantly increased visitor numbers to one of our sites, but a rather pleasant spin off.</p> <p><span id="more-763"></span></p> <p>Let me give you the low down. Instead of drving the traffic directly to the homepage of one of our existing websites or blogs, we decided to isolate the traffic and set up a squeeze page consisting of a free offer. This not only isolated the traffic stats from just this source, it also allowed us to test the conversions on our offer. This is where the pleasant little surprise turned up…… the free offer is converting at 11.67%. </p> <p>Now I’m not sure what sort of conversion percentage you are used to for your own offers, but this is out of the ball park for us. Now remember, the traffic that is coming to the squeeze page from this system is not targeted in any way – it is not the result of a Google search or link traffic from a related page. All sorts of products and markets are represented so the offer has to be strong to get this sort of result.</p> <p>What is the special offer I hear you ask. It is simply a no strings attached FREE lifetime membership to our <a href="http://www.e-profitformula.com" title="eProfit Formula"><u>eProfit Formula</u></a> online training site. What we are obviously getting in return is a list of people who are taking up our free offer that will be open to receiving further correspondence and product offers from us in the future. In short we are building our list free of charge…. and quite quickly I might add. Anyone who knows their marketing will tell you that you have to build your list. </p> <p>So how does this all work? We’ll give you a quick overview: </p> <p>The system is absolutely free to join. The <a href="http://www.fwebtraffic.com/?rid=1256820"><u>FWebtraffic</u></a> site promotes 6 different text adverts at a time. When you sign up to use the system, you’ll be given a link to a customized page that contains your own text advert on it in the top position (#1 of 6).</p> <p class="text2">Now, when other people want to sign up for the 6Links system and place their own advert on the site, they will first have to click on your advert (plus the other 5) and view your website for at least 15 seconds to get a special code that they need in order to use the system. They then add their advert in the top position, and yours will be moved down to the #2 spot.</p> <p class="text2">And this is where the viral nature takes over, and how your traffic and visitors grow in numbers.</p> <p class="text2">Every time someone else wants to use the system, they first have to click on each of the 6 text adverts, and visit your site. And then your advert gets moved down to the next position, all the way to position 6. Every time your advert gets pushed down to the next position, you will have thousands of extra people all promoting your advert, without you having to do a thing.</p> <p class="text2">It is so simple and better still its free traffic. </p> <p class="text2">The secret to making this system work is two fold. </p> <p class="text2">First you have to get out there and promote it. The easiest way to do this is simply do as we have, either send out an email to your own list or write a blog post about it and you’re away. You don’t need a huge list to start off with, you only need to get 10 people to sign up and you’re off an running. 10 is a good start but what you really want to do is keep promoting so your traffic numbers keep growing.</p> <p class="text2">To make things even easier for you to promote your site, <a title="FWebtraffic" href="http://www.fwebtraffic.com/?rid=1256820"><u>FWebtraffic</u></a> has created all the tools…. banners, text links and emails all at your disposal.</p> <p class="text2">Secondly, traffic on its own is useless, you need to make the visitor to your site take action…. and in this case quickly. What we would suggest is once again setting up a squeeze page with a special limited offer, capture your visitor’s data via an opt-in form and use the exercise to build your list. Build a relationship with your new visitor over time and convert them into a customer. By all means try and sell them right there and then, but we think you will get better results by building value into your offer over time through regular correspondence to your list.</p> <p class="text2">For an example of our squeeze page visit <a title="eProfit Formula" href="http://www.e-profitformula.com"><u>www.e-profitformula.com</u></a> Feel free to sign up for the offer – it is open to one and all.</p> <p class="text2">Now for the best bit…. here is the link to <a title="FWebtraffic" href="http://www.fwebtraffic.com/?rid=1256820"><u>FWebtraffic</u></a> and an example of one of the supplied banners.</p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.fwebtraffic.com/?rid=1256820"> </a></p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.fwebtraffic.com/?rid=1256820"> <br /> </a></p> <p class="text2">Still skeptical? Well we don’t blame you. All we can tell you is that it is working a treat for us and most of our clients are seeing similar results as well. If you’ve got a spare five minutes check it out – you won’t be disappointed.</p> <p class="text2">We’ll keep you up to date with our results.</p> <p class="text2">Until next time</p> <p class="text2">Your Business Buddies</p> <p class="text2">Marshall and Gary</p> <p class="text2"> </p> </article> <article> <h1>Start at the top with SEO</h1> <p>2009-07-27T11:09:34Z</p> <p>Hi, Marshall and Gary here</p> <p>All sorts of interesting bits and pieces exercise our minds here at <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong>. It is said that inspiration comes from the strangest places. Well, talking about <strong>online marketing</strong> and <strong>internet marketing strategies</strong> is no different.</p> <p>As I was driving my son to school this morning, I saw a learner driver in front of me. The company name on the car was something like <strong>AABEC Driving Company</strong>. I jokingly said to my son “I wonder if it is still the first driver teaching company in the phone book?” He, like all 16 year old boys, looked at me as if I was some kind of demented fool.</p> <p>So I had explain the strategy of choosing a business name that was one of the first in the telephone directory (white pages) or was the first listing for the business type (yellow pages). You get it – the most “A’s” and “B’s” at the front of your business name, and bingo – you are first on the alphabetic list. It is one of the original “get your name to the top of the search pile” <strong>marketing strategies</strong> in the old world.</p> <p><span id="more-750"></span></p> <p>Well, after dropping him at school I had to drive down to the coast to see a client. What should I see on the highway but a dump truck emblazoned with <strong>Aardvark Earthmoving</strong>. Another classic case of “first in the search list”.</p> <p>This co-incidence got us thinking at <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong>. Both these companies obviously looked at what was in the phone book before choosing their business name. There was no connection between the business owner and the name (apologies to Mr Aardvark should we be wrong). So anything starting with lots of “a’s” got more traffic and inquiries.</p> <p>Well, the <strong>internet </strong>now offers the same opportunity. However, it is no longer driven by such a narrow concept as how many “a’s” but by who is using the right words and phrases, and who has best optimised their <strong>website</strong>. But the logic is the same. Work out the best business name by working out what is the best name to get to the top of the pile.</p> <p>So in <strong>internet marketing</strong>, this means a <strong>high ranking</strong> in a search engine. The jury is never 100% certain on what the <strong>Google</strong> algorithm gives a positive tick to and not, but there is enough evidence to suggest when you have the opportunity to align a URL root name with your major keyword, that you should.</p> <p>So if you want to set up a driving lesson business in Brisbane, the keyword “driving lessons Brisbane” gets 390 exact searches a month in Australia. The domain name <span style="color: #0000ff;">www.driving-lesson-brisbane.com.au</span> is available to register. “Driving schools Brisbane” gets 480 exact searches a month and you can register this as a hyphenated domain name. Why would you go with the ego and register <span style="color: #0000ff;">www.marshallsdrivingschool.com.au</span> when far better optimised domain names are available?</p> <p>A couple of other things to note:</p> <p>• Google views a hyphen as a divider in a URL (so it is “reading” driving lessons Brisbane)</p> <p>• An optimised domain name is the start, not the finish – all other good off and <a title="7 Critial onpage SEO factors" href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/search-engines-and-seo/on-page-seo/" target="_self">on page SEO</a> still has to be done</p> <p>• From a searcher viewpoint, seeing a URL that exactly matches what they entered in as a search query will give your site a psychological advantage over a site which is the same service but the URL is less descriptive (www.marshalldrivingschool.com.au for example – is it local or national, who is Marshall, is he any good, I haven’t heard of him, etc)</p> <p>• Getting traffic is great, but your website still has to <strong>convert</strong> surfers to an <strong>action</strong></p> <p>• We are not suggesting that you abandon a good ranking site domain name just to aim for a few places higher</p> <p>Hope this helps clear your thinking on the choice of a domain name for your <strong>internet marketing strategies</strong>.</p> <p>Your business buddies</p> <p>Marshall and Gary</p> </article> <article> <h1>Do locals get high?</h1> <p>2009-07-17T00:59:22Z</p> <p>Hi Marshall and Gary here</p> <p>As you will know if you have followed our blog, getting a high ranking in <strong>Google</strong> exercises our mind regularly at <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong> and we are always on the look out on how to improve a <strong>ranking</strong>. We generally use our Small Business Internet Marketing blog as a bit of a crash test dummy to road test various strategies.</p> <p>One <strong>internet marketing strategy</strong> that we have been using for the past few months that has really worked for us is Google’s <strong>Local Business Centre</strong>. What this basically does is provides more like a Yellow Pages type of listing on a Google search query result based on a geographic modifier. In simple words, if someone searches for your business and then adds your location, Google picks this up and returns a result based on information you have supplied via the Local Business Centre facility of Google.</p> <p><span id="more-722"></span></p> <p>Let’s have a look at an example. Here is the search result for “<strong>small business internet marketing</strong>” on Google.com.au for “web pages” results. We have removed the higher ranking results for presentation purposes but you can see that we rank number 10 on this basis (we bounce between 3 and 12 on this search, I just ran it again and we came in at number 8). <a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/SMIB-SERP-10.png"></a>OK, now let’s change the search to “<strong>small business internet marketing Brisbane</strong>” on the same basis. You can see that we have moved to #1 ranking, but now also get a Google map locator plus a more prominent listing. This has been derived from our Local Business Centre information with Google, we are not listed in the Yellow Pages so it has not come from there. <a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/SMIB-LBC-rank-1.png"></a>So if you want to use this for your <strong>small business website or blog</strong>, you will need a Google account (as we always recommend, you should have a Google account regardless). When you sign in, go to “My Account” and then click on “Local Business Center”. Click on “Add a new listing” and then fill out the form and keep following the steps. Once completed, you will see an entry that looks like this: <a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/SMIB-LBC-Listing-detail.png"></a>That is it. Wait a day or so, then test by doing an appropriate <strong>keyword </strong>Google search plus a geographic modifier for where your business is located.</p> <p>We cannot guarantee that it will get you to a number 1 ranking, but it certainly helps. It also helps if you put the location name prominently on your site and coding (we use the meta description, meta keywords and page description to put “Brisbane” in).</p> <p>The <strong>Local Business Centre</strong> also has some other funky features. You can offer e-coupons to visitors, visitors can write a review (maybe from a friendly source?) and it gives directions on how to get to your physical location. It is also likely to have site statistics available as well sometime soon.</p> <p>One of our overarching principles is that if you want <strong>Google </strong>to like you, use as many of the tools that it provides. Logically it provides these tools to be consistent with its mission statement of returning relevant results for search queries, so by using them you are helping Google in its quest and, most likely, improving your results.</p> <p>Of course, this does not replace the <a title="7 Critical on-page SEO factors" href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/search-engines-and-seo/on-page-seo/" target="_blank">7 principles of good on-page SEO</a> that we detailed in an earlier post – it just adds on top of it to help your ranking.</p> <p>Your business buddies</p> <p>Marshall and Gary</p> </article> <article> <h1>There is no magic bullet for rankings</h1> <p>2009-07-03T00:46:15Z</p> <p>Hi Marshall and Gary here,</p> <p>Here at <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong> we are often asked by our <strong>small business</strong> clients “What is the one thing we can do to get a good ranking in <strong>Google</strong>?” It is like many people see that their site is lacking the one special ingredient that, when corrected or incorporated, will pump up their ranking. The number of snake oil internet sales pitches floating around seems to encourage this perception. You know “Rank number 1 in Google in 24 hours” type of push.</p> <p><a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/the-grinch.jpg"></a>We feel a bit like the Christmas Grinch when we have to say “There is no magic bullet.”</p> <p>As we have discussed a number of times on our posts, <strong>on-page SEO</strong> and <strong>off-page SEO</strong> is what gets your site ranking in Google. These are not overnight results. On-page optimisation by and large is within the control of a small business (with the right advice and understanding) whereas off-page optimisation is a far longer slog but certainly builds a fortress around your ranking when done properly.</p> <p><span id="more-712"></span><br /> We often talk about <strong>alignment </strong>and <strong>consistency </strong>being the keys to on-page optimisation. What we mean by this is:</p> <p><strong>Alignment </strong>refers to the <strong>keyword research</strong> you need to do in your business segment to determine what keywords have the appropriate search query volumes in the right geographic locations. Alignment also takes in other matters like the o<strong>nline commercial intention</strong> (are the keywords “buy” focussed), appropriateness to your business (as we said in the last post, an aquarium shop optimised for “business suits” is not a winner) and are the keywords really what they say (for example does “online editing” refer to text editing searches, video editing searches, audio editing searches, etc).</p> <p><strong>Consistency </strong>then refers to how you use the chosen keywords on your site. It is things like making sure keywords appear in the URL, in the page title, in the page description, in the copy on the page at the right density, etc. But it goes further. Many sites have way too many product offered on the one page – it confuses the life out of search engines because they just see a webpage with a whole pile of different products. Where possible, make each product (or group of similar product) its own webpage and optimise the keywords for this page differently to other pages.</p> <p>This may all seems fairly unexciting and ordinary, but we can tell you that virtually every website or blog we are asked to review or improve makes these same fundamental mistakes. Once you get these in place, then go hunting for suitable back links to your site for <strong>off-page optimisation</strong>. Have a read of our post on how <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong> got to a Google number 2 ranking through <a title="On-page optimisation" href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/search-engines-and-seo/the-power-of-on-page-seo/" target="_blank">on-page optimisation</a> alone.</p> <p>Think of the process like building a brick wall. Once you have the foundation, you build the bottom course brick by brick, you then build a second course brick by brick – eventually you have a six foot high solid fence, all made out of individual bricks. The foundation is having a domain and hosting package, each well researched keyword is a brick, each URL with the keyword in it is another brick, and so on and so on. Get it right and eventually Google cannot ignore your site.</p> <p>So, always remember that the ranking of every <strong>small business</strong> website or blog lives or dies by getting the <strong>alignment </strong>and <strong>consistency </strong>right first.</p> <p>Your business buddies<br /> Marshall and Gary</p> </article> <article> <h1>Does a Google number 1 ranking always matter</h1> <p>2009-07-02T03:19:40Z</p> <p>Hi Marshall and Gary here,</p> <p>Here at <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong>, we often see the claim “we will get your website to <strong>rank number one in Google</strong>“. This is, in itself, an admirable desire and can get significant visibility for a <strong>small business</strong>. However, it is an often abused claim from marketers as the mere ranking at number one in Google just means you have caught the eye of the spider for the searched words; it does not mean huge amounts of business will roll in through the internet.</p> <p>The missing parts of this <strong>online marketing </strong>equation are:</p> <p>• <strong>How many people</strong> are searching for the keyword<br /> • <strong>How relevant</strong> is the keyword to your business</p> <p>Obviously the greater the number searching, the better. And the more relevant the keyword to your business, the better. But any claim on <strong>keywords </strong>and Google rankings without reference to these 2 key metrics is ultimately meaningless from a business perspective.</p> <p><span id="more-692"></span><br /> Let’s look at some examples of what we mean.</p> <p><strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong> ranks number one in Google Australian page searches for “commercial keywords”. This, by the way, is not by design. When we analyse this keyword, we see that only 4 searches are done a day that include “<strong>commercial keywords</strong>” so we never have tried to optimise for it. However, we do rank number 2 for “<strong>small business internet marketing</strong>” which is something we are optimised for and has considerably more searches each day.</p> <p><a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/commercial-keywords-serp.png"></a></p> <p>We do find that some people mistake the available results returned by Google as highlighted here as the number of searchers for the keyword. Let make it clear that this is merely every page indexed by Google that has “commercial” and/or “keywords” in it, plus anything else that Goggle believes is relevant. You often see the mischievous claim like “…out of 538,000 searches on Google, we rank number one…” with the implicit suggestion that this site somehow will get a huge amount of traffic. No, no, no, no, no! It is not searches, it is results returned by Google.</p> <p>Another site that we have seen says it ranks number one for “male run business support” – which we do not doubt. Unfortunately, our research shows that this keyword has absolutely no searches for it. The fact that Google returns some 86,000,000 results is not relevant, the fact that no-one is searching for it is highly relevant. As a keyword, it has low commercial relevance (<strong>OCI</strong> of 36%).</p> <p>It is also worth considering what is a <strong>reasonable volume of searches for keywords</strong>. For someone pursuing an affiliate marketing strategy through using pay per click Adwords, volume is the key. The greater the volume, the more absolute conversions into sales (provided the optimisation is effective). On the other hand, we have done work for small consulting businesses specialising in a niche market. In this case, a search volume in Australia of 2 per day is more than acceptable if you only want to have 10 clients.</p> <p>So let’s state for the record what is relevant for a <strong>keyword strategy</strong>:</p> <p>1. They must have <strong>reasonable search volumes</strong> (relative to the business)<br /> 2. They must be <strong>relevant to the business</strong> (an aquarium shop optimised for “business suits” is not a great strategy); and <strong>if both these are met</strong><br /> 3. A <strong>high Google ranking</strong> for your site on the keyword</p> <p>Your business buddies<br /> Marshall and Gary</p> </article> <article> <h1>Are you using commercial keywords?</h1> <p>2009-08-04T01:06:15Z</p> <p>Hi Marshall and Gary here,</p> <p>Here at <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong>, we love using free tools and software to help<strong> small businesses</strong>, their owners and advisors as well. Well here is a great tool that is provided free by Microsoft (yes, Microsoft!). It is not new (been around since 2007) but we find most business owners and advisors are not aware of it.</p> <p>We know that businesses need to determine what keywords and phrases they should be targeting to get visibility in their <strong>online marketing</strong> via <strong>SEO</strong>, but the inevitable question is “Is the searcher using these words or phrases because they are looking to buy or are they just seeking information?” If it is the latter, why bother trying to optimise for this (which is a question worthy of its own post- more to come). Well Microsoft has a free tool that is designed to try to address this issue.</p> <p><span id="more-604"></span><br /> It is called “<strong>Online Commercial Intention</strong>” and can be found at what Microsoft call their “adlab” site at: <a href="http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx" target="_blank">http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx</a>. We will use “<strong>OCI</strong>” for ease of reference (plus that is what everyone online calls it).</p> <p>When you go to the <strong>Microsoft </strong>site, you will see a screen that looks like this (well part of it anyway).</p> <p><a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/oci-screenshot-1.png"></a>We have typed in “paintbrush” as the keyword we want to find out what the OCI is as an example. When you use this tool, make sure you set the button to <em><strong>Query </strong></em>rather than <em><strong>URL</strong></em> (because we are querying what the keyword is, not the site name – but use this URL function if you are thinking of different options for your website). Then hit <em><strong>Go</strong></em>.</p> <p>So what it shows here is that searches for the word “paintbrush” are likely to be non-commercial in OCI as it shows, and pretty strongly non-commercial (0.76 or 76% likelihood). This stands up to rational logic test we like to apply at <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing </strong>- the searcher is likely to want to find something out about paintbrushes, not to buy them.</p> <p>Well let’s try to make it commercial and see what we get:</p> <p><a href="http://www.smallbusinessinternetmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/oci-screenshot-2.png"></a>You will see we added the word “sale” to “paintbrush”. Obviously adding “sale” clearly makes it commercial in intent – the searcher is looking for a sale so therefore they are likely buyers. The result shows an overwhelming OCI of 99%. So it passes the rational logic test here.</p> <p>So far so good.</p> <p>The obvious question is how reliable or predictive is the Microsoft OCI. Well, that is for you to form your own opinion. We have certainly found that it keeps passing the rational logic test. The best strategy is to plug in some <strong>keywords </strong>that relate to your business and see what the result is – by and large you should have a gut feel as to whether it is right or wrong.</p> <p><strong>Microsoft </strong>has done testing in the outcomes from the algorithm that they use in calculating the OCI against real people views. If you want to see a summary of the study, go to the Learn More hyperlink at the bottom of the left hand side of the Microsoft adlab site. Basically, their results show around 90% correlation between the algorithm and real people. Sounds good – but it is not the only secret to online marketing success.</p> <p>Good luck with using OCI – it really is a useful guide to a searcher’s intention. We will talk about OCI more in future posts from <strong>Small Business Internet Marketing</strong>.</p> <p>Your business buddies<br /> Marshall and Gary</p> </article> </main></body></html>