Website Business 101 – The Timeless Secrets of Successful Internet Business

In 2010 I spend a few months writing my own eBook. Never really got around to publish it much but I thought I share it with all of you now as it seems still somewhat relevant.

When looking at the Top 20 Google Ranking Signals for 2017 it seems like some of my 2009 GreenHat SEO ideas still hold true.

How to be an SEO HERO top 20 Google Ranking Signals for 2017

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Gmail Priority Inbox

For everybody who didn’t see the new amazing feature on Gmail yet. Check your right hand top corner, next to your email address and before settings, there should be a RED link saying Priority Inbox.

With this feature Gmail will automatically start prioritizing your emails based on if you read them, reply to them or just don’t open them and gives you a better view in your Inbox to simply find see what is important and what is not. Will make your life a lot easier with you got a few dozenth of emails coming in.

I also suggest to everybody who like to get things done to check out ActiveInbox, the free version is great. It turns emails into actions to have a better workflow and overview of daily, weekly, monthly tasks. It helped me a lot to empty my inbox a lot faster.

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10 Free Tools for easy Website Business start

Everybody is talking about it; make money online, if your life is going nowhere and all doors have slammed shut in front of you, it very well may be the right time to do it. Building a small website and creating a connection with other people in the same industry is the first step for you in becoming successful online. There is however, always the big question, how I can do it easily and simply,  with no cost other then my time. I have compiled a list of 10 apps that you can use absolutely free right now to build your own Website Business. I guess the only thing you really need to pay for is a domain name; Godaddy.com is great for this as they are affordable and offer great services.

Google Apps

Google Apps are great! It takes the functionality of Microsoft Office suite online without ever again being tied down to a location. Email, Documents, Calendar and cites so many different functionalities all in one place as well as very easy to administration. If your Website Business grows and more people are involved you can simply add more users to your domain. You can also share documents with other people that are very helpful when you are working on a project with which you need to collaborate with others. In addition, the native gTalk is included so you can chat with your friends directly in your emails, give them a video or voice call, or share your desktop with them. At the moment you will not find better Office software for free anywhere. You can also use sites.google.com, it is included to build your own website. A simple website about you can be created by anybody with a small amount of effort.

Blogger

Blogger.com or Blogspot.com is one of the first sites that allowed you to create a user account and start your own blog. Now Google owns them and the servers seems to get better and better. You can get an easy to design Blog that you can update daily. It is easy to integrated with your other accounts like twitter and Facebook and offers you in a simple manner everything you need to start your own blog which you can use to create relationships with other people interested in your industry or niche. After you have enough followers you can start monetizing your blog. Blogger already offers you easy integration for this from Adsense as well as Amazon.

Youtube

Did you know that Videos on the internet are one of the fast growing markets? Did you also know that revenue from ads in videos has virtually exploded within the last few months? Signing up to YouTube.com and uploading your own videos can become a simple way to put money in your pocket every month. Sure, it will take sometime until the money comes in but then it will not stop. Most of the phones we are using these days can take videos that you than can just upload directly on to YouTube, don’t be shy film your self. http://www.youtube.com/t/howto_makevideo

FeedBurner

RSS / XML feeds are a semantic way of publishing and sharing with other websites. FeedBurner.com automates this for you. It automatically submits your newest content to search engines, RSS directory websites and people who subscribed to your RSS feed. This is an easy way to keep in touch with your followers as well as keep search engines up to date on what you are doing. It’s important to keep updating and adding new content to keep your readership happy. FeedBurner can also integrate with Adsense to allow you to display ads in your RSS feed. You may not want to do this in the beginning, but after you build yourself enough followers, it is a very good way to make money.

Adsense

Adsense is the platform Google uses to allow other people’s websites to display ads from there moneymaking machine Adwords. It is pretty simple, you display the ads from Adsense on your blog or in your RSS feed or YouTube Videos, somebody clicks on one of the ads and you get paid $ for each user who does it. This is an easy way to make money when publishing your own new unique content. You are paid directly from Google and they find the advertisers for your website.

Clickbank

For the more advanced user who has already established a larger following group and would like to start doing Affiliate marketing, Clickbank is a great place to start. It offers you a lot of training on how to succeed as an Affiliate marker to set you on the right path. The great advantage to this Affiliate marketing is that you are normally get paid a % of the revenue the company is making from your promotion. As example for subscription based offers, you will be paid every month a percentage of the revenue for each person you have promoted to a product.

Twitter

Twitter is a Social Media tool that you can use to connect with other people around the world. It is also a great tool to build a following around you. As more and more people see you as an expert and believe in the things you are saying, the easier it will become for you to sell them the products you are promoting. Using Twitter Automation software like Socialoomph.com can help you to gain a large number of followers within a matter of weeks. What you put in is what you get back!

Facebook

Another very important Social Marketing tool is Facebook, connecting with leaders from your niche or industry is an easy way to create new relationships and find place to publish content. Many people also started to use Facebook to meet new business partners or connect to people they like. Stay in touch with the people around you and you may get business coming your way that you never expected.

Meetup.com

Is a great way to find local groups interested in the same niche or industry as you are.  You may meet experts in your local community or even just find like minded people with whom you can do web projects or exchange content with.

Flickr

Flickr.com is a community to share your photos with other people. It is simple to create an account, upload pictures and use them on your pages or blog posts. Flickr gets a lot of traffic and can create very targeted and useful traffic to your website. It is also a great way to stay in touch with your friends by sharing photos of your last meeting with the world.

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Moving this weekend

This weekend I will move from a small little basement suite in Vancouver into a larger Apartment in Burnaby Metrotown area. There is much to do to get everything done but I think it will also help me with focusing better on my writing.

I will let you know how it all worked out 🙂 Could be that I don’t have Internet for a few days, but I hope not.

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Why building Website Business makes sense

Today I created a Video about why it makes sense to Invest into Website Business rather then offline stores at the moment.

Check it out and let me know what you think of it, thank you.

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Twitter Experiment – Was it worth losing over 400 Followers?

I joined Twitter when it was fairly fresh to the market, long before it began spreading everywhere in the mainstream media. I enjoy Twitter as it is like an ICQ, mixed with a message board. It is a very useful social media tool to stay connected with people over long distances, meet new and interesting experts and friends as well as keep up to date with current events. Last week I decided to change my Twitter strategy and conduct a Twitter experiment, here are my findings.

Automating Twitter can grow your Followers quickly.

Like most Internet Marketers, I like things that are automated. Why spend unnecessary time on a task if there is a way to let a computer do it. The 80 – 20 Rule applies to everything, and at the beginning, Automating most of my Twitter account seemed to be a great way to make it easier. I found SocialOomph.com to be a very useful tool to automate your Twitter account and get the most out of Twitter by reducing the time you spend managing or finding the information you like. With features like Autofollow followers, Scheduled tweets, Track keywords and send DM’s to new followers SocialOomph.com offers you the ability to automate the administration of your Twitter account for Free. I started using it when it was called TweetLater. At this time the main functionality was the Scheduled tweets. I used SocialOomph.com to scheduled updates with useful information from my Twitter account and watched as my Followers grew to over 2000 in two weeks. I also used the Autofollow function and, you guessed it, I followed everybody who followed me.

My Twitter was Useless

Another great tool for Twitter is TweetDeck, it is of great help with the day-to-day use of Twitter. Being able to manage multiple accounts as well as create simple views to check on the people you are following. Learn how to use TweetDeck effectively and save time is a great article to get you stared on TweetDeck. However, even using such advanced tools didn’t stop my twitter from becoming rather useless and spammy. I often felt overwhelmed by the amount of tweets I was receiving in one day. Often it was almost impossible to follow updates from my friends and the experts I follow. Every 30 seconds, my TweetDeck would update with 20 to 50 new tweets. Many of them were not helpful at all for the things I am doing with Twitter. I love following people and learning something new from them, but if I get updates about Real Estate in Arizona or Solar techniques every 30 seconds it really doesn’t make Twitter very useful for me.

How I lost over 400 followers in less then 3 days

Twitter Followers of FalkoInc

Last week I decided to focus more on Twitter again and write more articles for my blog. Not an easy thing to do but I feel that the content publishing or affiliate business model will suite me better in the long run. Last week I changed the way I used Twitter. I stopped using the Autofollow function and decided to clean up the list of people I follow. I reduced it to people, I personally know, or experts I want to follow to try to make it useful again. In return I lost over 400 followers within 3 days.

Only 17.39% of Twitter users are automated

Twitter people I follow

Now I’m only following 126 experts, tools and friends. 6 days later I’m sure that will change, but still I have more then 2000 followers on Twitter. That means only about 5.75 in 100 Twitter users are actually using the automation function on there account. This applies to both autofollow and autounfollow, which allows you to unfollow people who stopped following you. Sure this is a perfect example of the 80-20 rule, but it is also an opportunity to gain large number of followers in a short period of time. I can only say I’m very happy about the out come of this experiment. I’m finally able to use my Twitter effective again and use it more often then before.

If you liked the post, feel free to connect with me on Twitter @FalkoInc and leave me a comment if you have any questions or a difference in opinion to this topic.

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What does PPC stand for?

PPC means Pay Per Click and is the most common form of Internet marketing currently used in the world. It can be used to send instant traffic to any website in any Internet niche. It is most commonly used to send targeted traffic to a page using only the keywords related to the page or product the Advertiser is trying to sell. It also can be used to send a large amount of visitors to a “squeeze” page to collect Emails address to add your list. PPC is extremely useful to test long-term SEO strategies as well to ensure that the keywords targeted will convert.

Almost every major website offers some form of PPC advertising. Some of the biggest PPC networks are Google Adwords, Yahoo Advertising, Microsoft AdCenter and Facebook. There are also smaller Advertiser Networks that use the PPC model to sell ads on websites across the globe.

The Top 10 tips for a successful PPC campaign:

  1. Create Ad groups for each page you are targeting
  2. Use only relevant and exact keywords
  3. Use only relevant Ads for the right pages
  4. Geo-target your Ads
  5. Start with a low budget and then increase for converting terms
  6. Don’t start bid wars spot 3 – 5 often suffice
  7. Monitor your PPC campaign daily to ensure maximum ROI
  8. Split test your Ads every month to see if you can improve conversion or CTR
  9. Delete Keywords that have high traffic but don’t convert
  10. Ensure clean and relevant Landing page for each Ad you are running

PPC is an efficient and easy way to generate revenue on almost any website. However, dif done incorrectly, it will devalue your website very quickly and you will lose money. I would suggest to start with a conservative daily budget and slowly increase it as experience and conversion are growing. It is also good to hire a PPC Marketing company to help your Website Business with running a successful campaign.

If you have any questions about this topic please leave a comment.

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What does SEO stand for?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization of the pages your website is comprised of. Search Engine Optimization is a very important factor of Internet Marketing and is there to ensure visibility of your pages to Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Live, or Badu. If you make it easy for a Search Engine to read your website pages, the more relevancy and targeting you will achieve for the right keywords. Depending on the amount of links as well as which anchor text is deployed, such methods are vital factors in determining the ranking of keywords when search engines scan your pages.

On-Page SEO is the art of maximizing your visibility to Search Engines by keeping or increasing conversion rates to generate leads and sales on your website. All the traffic in the world is not enough if it does not convert into actual profit.

The Top 10 most important ranking factors for On-Page SEO:

  1. Site Structure
  2. Unique URLs for each page
  3. Unique page title for each page
  4. Unique Meta Description for each page
  5. Unique H1/H2 tag for each page
  6. Only one version of each page, no duplicate content
  7. Fast reliable webhosting
  8. Enable Compression per Mod_deflate
  9. Optimizing of code e.g. no inline CSS, Javascript or Ajax in pages
  10. Minify of code for easy clear reading

Off-Page SEO is the creation of awareness to your website. Awareness is normally created through building links, advertisement on other sites and if you are published in Magazine. Text links with targeted anchor text are generally the most desirable way of creating awareness for your website. They have a long-term effect and increase your website ranking across all Search Engines.

The Top 10 most important ranking factors for Off-Page SEO:

  1. Text Links with keyword rich Anchor text surrounded by relevant text
  2. Text Link to product pages from related websites
  3. Customer reviews on review sites like Yelp.com
  4. Social Media presence as well as active use of Social Networking sites
  5. Local, Industry-related or mainstream Internet Directories
  6. Industry-related commenting on other websites
  7. Articles on Content Publisher sites like Suite101.com with Footer link
  8. Industry-related Forums and Communities
  9. Published in print media like Magazines or Newspapers
  10. Videos on popular video sites like YouTube

Please let me know what you think or leave a comment.

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Local Internet Marketing Groups at Meetup.com

In the last week, I have tried to spend more time going to local meetup groups here in Vancouver. There are a large number of groups covering Internet marketing, SEO, SEM, PPC and similar interests. There are also experts in the field present at these events, eager to share their knowledge with you. As well as very knowledgeable experts that are happy to share information with each other.

On the 15th of July, I went to the Vancouver Internet Marketers meetup at the J lounge. Gordon Martin from DropWizard gave a good presentation about “Basic SEO/SEM – how to start/use these techniques to promote your web business”. I would have liked to link the presentation as I thought it was well made with useful information butI but, unfortunately for the first part, the projector had some issue so they decided not to put the presentation online. After the presentation, there was an opportunity to mingle. I noticed John Chow and managed to have a great chat with him. It was great to see my friend Aimie at the meetup, it has been too long 🙂

Yesterday I went to the monthly SEO/SEM roundtable, with my buddy Dmitriy being on the Expert Panel this month I thought I need to go by and check it out. Carlos from Bloom Marketing was also present and we had a beer and a good conversation for a while. I found it very interesting to observe how the Internet marketing strategists in Vancouver utilize their second language to market to foreign markets.

I personally love meetups, it is so much better to talk to people face to face and share knowledge with each other. I will try to be now a regular at Vancouver Meetups and create seminars and presentations to share information with my local Internet Marketer community.

If you are running a Meetup.com Group in Vancouver and would like me to give a presentation or seminar about Internet Marketing, please leave a comment under the post. I would love to help.

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Most e-Commerce sites waste over 40% of their potential traffic!

Last week I wrote about how redesigning your Website is not always the best way to go. It is just sometimes not worth the trouble to completely reinvent the wheel if you already have an existing website business. Sometimes it is better to get an overview from an Internet Marketer to know where you are and what to do next. SEO site reviews are always a good start to get an idea what to do next.

Some of my friends ask me what I think are the most common mistakes e-Commerce sites do to limit its search engine visibility. I will list 5 most common mistakes I encounter while visiting e-Commerce sites on a daily basis. I will use examples from www.frontierpc.com since this company is a typical e-Commerce site that is trying to overachieve without fixing the basics first.

Page Titles

Linksys-spa-2102-ranking

The page title is there to attract visitors to click through your site. Okay, none of the sites here has thought to make the page title less than 66 characters to make it fit nicely on to the search results. A good page title also includes a call to action and some branding for your own company, that helps if somebody uses your page title as anchor text for a link. This will give the visitor a sense of recurring focal points. We humans do not like new things if we get used to something. Emphasizing the brand names and trust symbols will ensure visitors load your site faster and in turn will improve your conversion rate. My suggestion for the page title would be something along of this:

Buy Linksys SPA-2102 VoIP Gateway for only $74.98 – FrontierPC.com

Remember this is a product page, for category pages and other pages it should be more fitting to the content on this given page. Another thing that you need to keep in mind is the conversion cycle when customers look up product names. Customers are now looking for the most trusted source to get the product for a good price so give them what they ask for. Questions to ask yourself are: What is the action on the page the visitor should do? What is the name of the product and price? Viewing the name or url of your business on that page will help to give visitors a sense of reoccurring corporate identity.

There is no perfect or best way to do page titles but to put yourself into the shoes of your potential client. You could also ask some of your clients how they would react to a page title of a product page.

In addition to this, remember that over 60% of all clicks going to the top 3 organic search results is where you get most of your clicks.

Meta Description

Buy from real-time stock, we ship Linksys Linksys SPA-2102 VoIP Gateway, 1 | 2 Port(s), 10/100Base-TX Interface(SPA2102-NA) from Toronto, Vancouver, …

This is the meta description of Linksys Gateway in the search results. Yet again, the number of characters is much higher than the recommended 150 to 160 charters so it is cut off again from Google. However, a problem with this meta description is that it does not give any kind of information that would help me to know immediately what to expect on this page. I think using the meta description to provide more detailed information on what to expect on the page is a good practice here.

One day shipping to most Canadian cities of Linksys SPA-2102 VoIP Gateway, 1 | 2 Port(s), 10/100Base-TX Interface(SPA2102-NA) buy it from FrontierPC.com

You can still automate the creation of a Meta Description like this, but if you do so try to bring together the most important information. For example, FrontierPC.com offers one day shipping to most cities in Canada. That is a great selling point since you often end up for a long time if you live in Canada. Test the Meta Description more than once and get some of your colleagues to read over your Meta Description to see how they react to it.

URLS

In the above screenshot you see how the top two search results have the name of the product inside the url.

www.pricebat.ca/Cisco-Linksys-SPA-2102-VoIP-Gateway.u_457972
www.shopbot.ca/pp-linksys-spa2102-linksys-price-19345.html

Both are not very pretty but compared to what FrontierPC.com has in place, almost a quantum jump in evolution.

www.frontierpc.com/productDetails.aspx?eId=11894311

Not helpful to identify where I’m on the site or what I should expect from this page. In addition, all search engines put a lot of value in finding keywords in the url of a page. For example, the Linksys SPA 2102 Gateway at FrontierPC.com page url should be like this:

www.frontierpc.com/linksys-spa-2102-voip-gateway.html

A better way to create your urls is to align them with your site structure. In the case of FrontierPC, I could not really figure out their site structure. I will give some examples how you could place a product page into the site structure.

You could create your site structure based on brand names, e.g. brand names are your categories:

www.frontierpc.com/linksys/spa-2102-voip-gateway.html

Alternatively, you could make your structure based on category names:

www.frontierpc.com/gateway/voip/linksys-spa-2102.html

This really depends on how you choose to organize your website. I will elaborate on this in the site structure part of this article.

Navigation

The navigation on www.FrontierPC.com is more or less a little difficult, like most PC e-Commerce sites are. However, I will not talk about the user-friendliness of the navigation since the navigation builds your site structure. I will talk about it from an SEO point of view. Most people don’t realize that making something easy to read for search engines often means it makes it easier to read for humans as well. Both don’t react positively on information overflow, both like to follow an easy to use route that does not make them work hard and both hate to get deceived.

homepage-frontierpc

The homepage offers a large list of random items. If a visitor lands on your homepage, you could perhaps classify this visitor as a lead. Stuffing random products right into his face could easily let him bounce back and look elsewhere for the product. A better practice is to rather focus on the categories to drive the traffic and page rank downwards into the category pages.

voip-category-frontierpc

The VoIP Gateways category page does not offer much better navigation than the homepage. If I have no clue which brand I at least prefer I have not much of a chance to find what I’m looking for. At a glance, I can already expect quite a lot of duplicate content in this area of the site. Again, choose to make it simple or as the designing principle goes “Don’t Make Me Think.” Subcategories would be a great way to organize products and the pages can bring you a substantial amount of organic traffic.
Navigation-frontierpc

The product page from FrontierPC.com does not seem to have any kind of navigation. That is not a bad idea but breadcrumbs would be useful to put in place all over the site. The rest should be determined by some focus groups that test the design.

Site Structure

I could probably go for another 5 pages about how important site structure is and how to implement it but then nobody would read any of my following articles anymore.

The perfect way to structure a website is in a pyramid with the homepage on top, the category pages building the first level, the subcategory pages on the second level and the product pages being the foundation.

site-structure

As you can see, the deeper  one goes  into the site, the more pages of the same kind are in place. This means as farther away you go from your homepage, the lower the page rank should be for the pages. As I mentioned earlier in this article, it is suggested to align your site structure with your keywords. This means that should put the high value keywords on top and work your way down from here. Product pages don’t need as much page rank as a category page doe.  For example, it is quite impressive how often people search VoIP Gateway.

Summary

Websites like FrontierPC.com that have been around for a while now rank well for many keywords but are often far away from ranking as number one with a lot of pages. If they would manage to get ranking in the Top 2 for around 30 – 50 % of their products they would be happy. Right now, I don’t foresee this achievement anytime soon with the current SEO strategy. I would suggest to them to contact an Internet Marketer first to help them improve their site immediately before spending thousands of dollars on a redesign of the site.

If you would like to get your business review in a post, please click on the contact me now link on top and tell me why.

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