Introduction

Search Engines have developed into the Internet’s most popular and powerful source of information, accounting for an estimated 80% of the Internet’s traffic (Heche, 2007, p. 1). As a result, website owners are realizing the power in such devises and are shifting marketing budgets into the optimization of their sites specifically for search engines. During the toddler years of search engine optimization (SEO), crafty developers took advantage of weak search engine algorithms to display their websites in top results, regardless of their site’s relevance. However, as more advanced Internet search engine technologies emerged to solve such exploits, new SEO methods were pursued (Boykin, 2007, p. 1). With the growth in search engine popularity and accuracy, and with newly emerging techniques used to target such engines, SEO has become a cut-throat competitive industry that is quickly being dominated in its utilization by big-business corporations (Murray, 2007, p. 1). Regardless of a company size and status, however, company webmasters with basic knowledge of HTML and blogging can establish top search engine rankings for websites that target niche markets with great efficiency by employing specific on-page and off-page SEO techniques. A Search Engine Primer

Search engines did not become popular overnight. In fact, it took half a decade for the general public to catch on to the power of them. Search engines have become a woven part of society only because of their brilliant architecture; systems with frameworks so complex, yet so simple in user utilization that a novice can operate it. Concisely, the modern search engine is an intricate tool formulated to minimize the discovery time of information by minimizing result digression and maximizing result accuracy based on hundreds of relative factors. The basic functionality of a search engine includes content discovery, indexing, querying, and ranking (Fishkin, 2007, p. 4).

Content discovery is often referred to as “Web crawling”. The analogy of the “Web” is an important concept to grasp, since its analogy will act as a backbone to understanding the search engine discovery process and the terminology involved. The internet can be generally referred to as the World Wide Web, or just Web for short, because the structure of the internet most resembles the structure of a spider web (Davis, 2005, p. 1). Each of the billions of pages of content are linked together in some way or another to create an incomprehensibly large network of connections. Consequently, search engines have called their automated programs that crawl this web “bots” or “spiders”. Modern crawlers revisit indexed sites on a regular basis to look for changes or revisions. Sites are normally updated by the crawler between a one or two months time. In estimation, search engines have only crawled about half of the Web’s content pages, accounting for between eight to ten billion pages (Fishkin, 2007, p. 4).

Every page that is crawled on the Web by a search engine is placed into a gigantic database called an index or sometimes a catalogue. Massive organization is applied to the index in a way that requests can sort through billions of pages and find relevant matches within just fractions of a second. Sometimes it can take a considerable amount of time for a search engine to actually index a site after crawling it. During this time, the site will not be available on index to those searching (Fishkin, 2007, p. 4).

Content querying is the provision of an interface or gateway connecting the human user and the results waiting inside the search engine database. The results vary in type from web pages to online published word processor documents, and are returned to the user based on the criteria they indicate. The method a user might use to indicate criterion varies based on the search engine. Search engines normally provide a blank text input field in which the user can type terms or phrases into then press a button to send the query to the search engine for processing. Many modern search engines incorporate exclusive input syntaxes that a user might learn to take full advantage of the search engine’s power. Natural language searches, however, allow a user to input full sentence-structured questions instead of requiring the user to learn query syntaxes (Sullivan, 2007, p. 1). An example of syntax is placing terms in quotations. Google, the most commonly used search engine of today, uses quotations to specify results that return exact matches to all the terms in the order they are listed in quotations. Google includes ten other operators used to better define a query and home in on the target results (Google Cheat Sheet, 2007, p. 1).

Ranking becomes a search engine’s most distinguishing process, as this will determine what and how information is displayed to the user. A commonality all search engines share by nature is the organization of pages by relevancy starting first with most relevant and ending with least. The higher a page’s rank is, the higher the site’s probable relevance will be as perceived by the engine. Every search engine uses its own unique method of determining how pages rank in relation to one another, and these are called algorithms. An algorithm is a mathematical formula that will take into consideration dozens of factors that have positive and negative effects on page rank. Think of it as a set of rules that a judge uses to determine which girl wins in a beauty pageant. The winner will always showcase more than just beauty alone, but instead, indicate a deeper purpose like the reputation, talents, and even life intentions. The many factors involved in judging contestants in a beauty pageant are very much like the factors used to rank a webpage (Sisson, 2006, p. 12). Brief History of the Search Engine

The earliest breeds of search engines were not actually search engines at all, but rather massive directories of content pages manually submitted by their authors. It was not until spiders and bots came to the scene that people began to see the power behind such tools (Wall, n. d. , p. 8). Archie appeared in 1990 as the very first tool used to search pages of the Internet. It was named Archie to resemble the word “archive” without the “v”. Built by Alan Emtage, the program indexed directory listings from public FTP sites. An alternative tool emerged a year later called Gopher, which indexed solely text files instead of all computer files. Two other index systems called Veronica and Jughead searched the Gopher index servers and provided more targeted keyword search (Wall, n. d. , p. 2). By 1993, a new generation of search engine emerged from a student at MIT: automated web crawling. Initially used for counting and measuring the size of the Web, the first web crawling bot on the Internet was named the World Wide Web Wanderer by its creator Matthew Gray. ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing of the Web) was introduced in the same year with the capability to collect page meta-data and allow page authors to submit their own content. Search engines and crawling technology wasn’t yet seen as having any true significance for society until further university experiments were done (Wall, n. d. , p. 1).

As the Internet gained popularity and started appearing as a business opportunity to investors, college students began getting large funding opportunities. This boom in funding caused break-through developments such as relevancy-based indexing to occur. Corporations like Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Yahoo, and Google in turn met at the search engine scene, each bringing their own new innovations to the table. Altavista offered a brand new method of searching for the end-user known as natural language inquiry (Wall, n. d. , p. 1). Ask Jeeves was quick to mimic this technique, but also focused on building its index from web communities. A few years later, Altervista was bought by Yahoo! for 235 million dollars, which was just one of that many small steps taken toward the multi-billion dollar establishment Yahoo! is today (Olsen, 2003, p. 1). Lycos contained the largest index of any search engine of its time with more than 60 million documents in 1996, but eventually evolved into the fifth most popular web portal in the world (Sherman, 2002, p. 1). Lycos abandoned its own search engine algorithm, and began powering its search feature by Ask in 2006, which is former Ask Jeeves (O’Reilly, 2006, p. 1).

Although Google entered the scene relatively late in 1998, it still managed to ultimately come out on top from its tough search engine competitors (Google Milestones, 2007, p. 1) Through collaboration, Larry Page and Sergey Brin babied their creation until receiving more than 25 million dollars in funding in just a year’s time from its initial launch (Google Milestones, 2007, p. 3). Google partnered with AOL and Yahoo! by early 2000, which also marked the release year of the renowned Google toolbar (Google Milestones, 2007, p. 4). In 2007, Colvin of CNN reported that “Google’s figure is $149 billion and rising fast, pushing the company past most of America’s biggest, most successful, most respected corporations” (Colvin, 2007, p. 1). It is clear that Google has conquered the search engine war, rendering it as the most valuable search engine webmasters can optimize for their websites. Google has practically set the standard for other search engines that have followed the leader’s footsteps. Because of this, Google-specific page ranking factors are currently the most significant for any SEO venture because of competing search engines’ inherent similarities (Ryan, 2006, p. 1). On-Page Search Engine Optimization

Jumping straight into SEO, it is imperative to understand that success relies heavily on the keywords that are chosen for the optimization venture. Because keyword terms can be found inside content, titles, headers, and images of a webpage, these are all considered on-page objects and therefore contribute to the optimization of the page itself. Keywords can be thought of as the foundation upon which SEO is built on, when if removed from the equation it leaves a broken structure. In relation to SEO, keywords are terms used to define the purpose of a webpage in its entirety (Fishkin, 2007, p. 9).

Commonly, there is confusion between metadata keywords and content keywords. metadata entries, which are code strings placed in the code heading of pages, are no longer used for relevancy because they were taken advantage of by having irrelevant keywords that attracted undeserved attention. For this metadata keywords are no longer used, while metadata descriptions are only used as snapshots for a few rare search engine directory page entries. Because of all this, metadata entries are very insignificant to SEO. In the world of keywords, content is king. When a search query is sent, the search engine will try to return with pages that match best to the inquiry keywords found within a page’s content (Sisson, 2006, p. 8). Since so much relies on keywords, it is common practice to conduct research to seek the right related keywords or keyword combinations that are optimizable for a given scenario. There are several free online tools available for keyword research, such as the tool suite found at http://tools. seobook. com/keyword-tools (Callen, 2005, p. 32)

Keywords that are too popular will actually have a negative impact on search rankings because of the overcoming competition. Instead of seeking popular solo keywords like “insurance” or “games”, it is much more effective to find a niche (Callen, 2005, p. 12). A niche homes in on the specific product, idea, or service that is attempting to be displayed in search results. When optimizing for a focused target audience, the competition is easier to outsource, and in turn will always promise high rankings when page optimization is established. Instead of seeking a single magic keyword, it is best to seek a keyword combination or a phrase that will best describe a niche specifically. Most people enter 2-5 word phrases into search queries, which ensures security with multi-keyword niches (Sisson, 2006, p. 13).

Some webmasters have tried repeating their keywords excessively on their pages to boost frequency. What these webmasters might not understand is that excessive keywording is like playing with fire, where if they get too close they will get burned. If a search engine notices an unusually excessive repetition of keywords, the engine will demote the site and may even ban it from its index completely. In contrast to this, search engines are now intelligently seeking common relationships between terms on the Web, so when keywords are used throughout a document with fluency and in good context, this can quickly benefit a site’s ranking (Fishkin, 2007, p. 9).

Keywords should be strategically placed on a webpage to maximize keyword frequency without running the risk of being seen as a keyword spammer by the search engine. If more than one keyword combination is being targeted by your site, it is important not to strand keywords together in an attempt to increase keyword relevance. In page content, header code tags will emphasize keywords for users as well as search engine spiders. Placing keywords naturally in the alt tags of content relating images will also boost page relevance, and return your site in image search results. Most importantly, naturally mentioning keywords in body paragraph text will increase keyword frequency. To reiterate however, it is important not to overuse keywords in body paragraphs, since some search engines might suspect a site with that sort of ‘keyword juicing’ as spam (Sisson, 2006, p. 13).

Linking is another imperative factor of page rankings which will be covered in greater detail in off-page techniques, but is also a part of on-page optimization. Internal linking generates a hierarchy of synonymous page rank based upon which pages are linked most. Many webmasters often do not realize they are making a mistake when chain-linking content more than two levels away from the homepage, or mesh linking. Mesh linking occurs when every page contains a link to every other page in the site, giving every page with equal importance. This means a contact or form page will rank just as high as the actual meat of the site. To solve this issue and direct the search engines’ focus towards pages of importance, a hierarchical linking system should be established. To create linking hierarchy, not all pages are cross linked, and important pages are linked to by the largest number of pages on the site (Sisson, 2006, p. 37). Off Page Search Engine Optimization

While on-page optimization provides a solid basis for a website being recognized by spiders, it is the links from other websites that determine the rank of the recognized page. Off-page search engine optimization is mostly concerned with this establishment of inbound links to the focus website. The process is known as link building, and is by far the most strenuous aspect of SEO. A site’s page rank is determined by both the quantity and quality of its incoming links. The quality of a link is the most weighted factor, which is based upon the page rank of the site making the link. If the linked site has relevance to the site being optimized, then this is a positive detail (Fishkin, 2007, p. 26). Relevancy is determined by comparing keywords in website titles, the anchor text of the link, and even its IP address. The IP address or number value that the domain name refers to may have less weighted effect on page ranking if it shares a common third octet (Sisson, 2006, p. 43). Sites that have very high page ranks are referred to as ‘authoritative’ and will almost automatically boost the page rank of a site it links to. Two forms of linking exist: two-way and one-way.

Two-way linking is also known as reciprocal linking because it is a mutual establishment between site owners. This method is essentially a link swap. Some webmasters carry the misconception that paying for well known link exchange services will guarantee site visits, but this is only true on a temporary degree (Sisson, 2006, p. 54). Also, link exchanges are considered manipulative and have a record of incurring removal of sites from search engine indexes.

One-way link building can sometimes be considered a science and art, since many techniques are nothing short of brilliant. One scheme often used to build massive amounts of inbound links is to produce a gadget or banner that appeals to other site owners, and encourages them to take a code snippet for the gadget or personalized banner and place it on their own site. An example of this method is evident at www. nerdtests. com. This site offers a free and fun online quiz that ranks the user’s nerdiness in percent relation to everyone else who took the quiz and awards an ‘official title’ banner code based on the outcome. These banners can be found floating all around the net in user signatures of online community forum boards or even on personal blogs and provides www. nerdtests. com with an endless link base (Spencer, 2007, p. 1).

The most common and reliable method of getting back-links is submitting articles to informative websites, which usually give authors an opportunity to link to their personal site. Social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del. icio. us, StumbleUpon, and Propeller all have recently become a hit sensation among frequent internet users. These bookmarking sites provide a portal to sites recommended by other users. If the content on a site is valuable or entertaining enough to people, social bookmarking sites may be the most effective approach to off-page optimization since they are based on popularity and massive viral tendencies (Hagen, 2007, p. 5). Method

As my primary research, I conducted an interview on October 25, 2007, consisting of ten focused questions about SEO with Bill Slawski. Bill is the President of SEO by the Sea and the Director of Internet Marketing for KeyRelevance Inc. , and was directly referred to me by Rand Fishkin, one of the world’s most renowned and authoritative SEO experts. Bill is one of the founders and administrators of Cre8asite Forums, is an active correspondent for Search Engine Land, and writes a weekly column for their small business section. Mr. Slawski’s professional credentials substantiate the validity of his interview responses and provide access to exclusive insider industry knowledge. The interview was completed via electronic mail, in which Bill took full advantage of to respond with in-depth and intuitive answers complete with real-world examples. Results

As the first question of my interview, I asked Bill how he would define SEO to the average Internet user. Bill responded, “In simplest terms, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is applying knowledge of how search engines work to make sites easier to find on the web for the audiences that those pages were intended to attract. In more complicated terms, SEO is a matter of combining an application of marketing ideas and a knowledge of search engines to help bring the right people to a site so that they will change from visitor to consumer. ” This description spells out the fundamental concepts of SEO. It is important to understand SEO, in essence, is limitless in ways of targeting consumer markets. While advertising schemes might be limited to the specific targets the advertising company provides based upon the small amount of information shared with them about your product, SEO delves into your niche and allows for much more targeting flexibility.

My second question for Bill was, “In what ways is SEO more effective or efficient than other online marketing methods?” He responded saying, “Search engine optimization means being aware of how search engines might collect information from the pages of a website, and making it easy for the search engines to index the content of those pages. In effect, it means enabling a search engine to become an index for the pages of a site. It can be less expensive than using the paid contextual ads that you see displayed with search results at a search engine, or the banner ads that show up on other websites that may point to the site advertised. ” This cost efficiency is an important component of why business professionals are making the leap away from conventional pay per click advertising as their primary marketing strategy and making the switch to search engine optimization.

The third question pointed towards the public view on this experts own industry. My question was, “Do you think the power of SEO is relatively undermined, or in contrast, do you think it is overplayed as an online marketing method in the industry?” He responded with, “Search is one of the commonest activities that people get involved in when the go online, so making a website easy to be found in a search engine for people who might be looking for what that site has to offer is a good idea. It can make sense to include SEO as one part of a multiple part marketing effort, and to build a strong marketing plan that includes both online and offline parts. Unfortunately, there are differing skill sets amongst people who offer SEO services – some are just better than others. ” While my question was meant to explore SEO’s public relation solely, Bill brought up an extremely important reiteration of SEO’s unknown power when combined with an ultimate market plan encompassing offline target markets as well as the ones who exist online. This also adds to the concept of ‘limitless’ SEO possibilities.

I asked for my next question, “Can any website benefit from SEO?” Bill explained, “SEO is only really important to sites that want to increase their visibility on the Web. A game clan site, where everyone who needs to know the address of the site already does has no need for SEO. But, if you hope to attract visitors to your pages, it doesn’t hurt to make them as search friendly as possible. And if you want to attract people to those pages who might be interested in the content of the pages, it doesn’t hurt to try to use words on the pages that those people might try to search with on a search engine, and to do it in a manner that makes it more likely that those words will be found earlier on in search results. ” Drawn from his answer is a suggestion of widely conventional use for SEO. Unless meant specifically to be concealed from Internet users, any website seeking visitors can benefit largely from any amount of SEO. Since amateur implementation of SEO is key part of this paper, the next question was very distinctive in terms.

I asked, “Is it possible for webmasters to (with fundamental knowledge of HTML and blogging) implement SEO for themselves with relatively successful results for their small websites?” Unsurprisingly, my prediction was reinforced with his answer. Bill said, “Webmasters with a fundamental knowledge of HTML and blogging can achieve some success with being found on the web, but having a good knowledge of how search engines work can help a webmaster make better choices about how their site is set up for success with search engines. ” I asked, “In general, what is the timeline of results returned by SEO?” Bill responded saying, “The amount of time that it may take to achieve results may vary by the site involved and how much work it might need, the competitiveness of the market it is within, and the demand for what the site offers. It’s almost impossible to guarantee success generally, and perhaps even harder to do it within a specified timeline. ” While other sources have noted results can be seen in a matter of days in some cases, it seems there is no definitive amount of time that promises results to become evident. In that, the SEO marketing solution may not always suite for website owners seeking instant Web traffic.

This question focused on SEO as a long-term asset. I asked Bill, “Do you believe SEO may become obsolete in the future?” He explained, “I don’t see it becoming obsolete as much as I see it evolving. What we considered SEO in 1998 is different than what we consider it to be now. If you look at a set of search results in Google today, you may see videos, images, news, web pages, product searches, and other results that you wouldn’t have seen even a couple of years ago. The web is changing and search engines are changing, and helping people so that they understand some of these changes and how they might impact their web sites will probably continue to be a need to be filled in the future. ” This provides a fairly straight answer indicating that SEO will only continue to progress with changes over time, rendering SEO as a very reasonable long-term asset for any website.

My final and most important question asked, “In what ways might SEO be viable for businesses with niches?” Bill responded saying, “Finding a niche where you can be competitive, and where there’s a demand from consumers can increase your likelihood of success. A small business can often take advantage of working within a niche that a larger business might find to be too much work for too little return. If the smaller business has considerably less overhead in terms of cost and time, they may be able to thrive in one of those niches. By focusing upon a specific market or audience that others aren’t, it may be possible to be found easier if people want to find the service or goods or information that you provide within that niche. ” This is a fabulous reverberation of how specific keyword combinations and niches interact. Focusing on smaller markets can provide a better means of success on a smaller, yet more attainable scale. Discussion

Throughout the extent of my research, SEO had been discovered to be one of, if not the, most effective Internet marketing strategies available today. Statistics have shown that the largest magnitude of online users discover information and merchandise through the use of search engines. SEO channels that majority of Internet traffic directly into a marketable solution, idea, or product with the best cost and time efficiency. By employing on-page and off-page techniques, a webmaster with basic knowledge of HTML and blogging can supply a particular niche website with a top search engine result ranking respective to its niche search keywords. Keywords play an imperative role in the SEO venture by providing the base of the optimized structure. The keyword focus of a pre-optimized website is determined through intense research by identifying competition and analyzing keyword query frequencies using particular keyword research tools. After keywords are determined, on-page content structure and coding is the next priority, seeing as off-page link building logically requires a quality page to link to beforehand. Off-page techniques will utilize link building strategies to launch the rankings already established by on-page SEO past competition.

The product produced as a result from my intense research will enable any adventurous amateur with fundamental HTML and blogging familiarity to pursue SEO with relatively guaranteed success. My product, in the form of a website, guides the pursuer with simple and concise instructions. The website splits the SEO mission between on-page and off-page techniques which have been explained in earlier sections of this paper. Instead of discussing these techniques in non-applicable generality however, the website will demonstrate specific examples of each optimization practice with its own optimized features. To view my final product website, click here.

For references used in this paper, click here.

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The Easiest

Step by Step Guide

to creating your own Online Business



another product from www. durban-property-searcher. co. za



Index of contents





Legal Notice



While all attempts have been made to verify the information in this publication, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretations of the subject matter herein.

This publication is not intended as a source of legal or accounting advice. The publisher wants to stress that the information contained herein may be subject to varying state/local laws or regulations. All users are advised to retain competent legal counsel to determine what state and /or legal laws or regulation may apply to the users’ particular business.

The purchaser or reader of this publication assumes responsibility for the use of these materials and information. Adherence to all applicable laws, local and otherwise, governing professional licensing, business practices, advertising and all other aspects of doing business in South Africa or any other jurisdiction is the sole responsibility of the purchaser or reader.

The author and publisher assume no responsibility or liability, whatsoever on the behalf of the purchaser or reader of this publication.

Any perceived slights of people or organizations are unintentional.

1. Introduction:

Well, first off, congratulations on downloading this step by step guide to creating and starting your own online business.

In a nutshell, we will explain how to setup your very own business online and also give those of you who simply do not have the time at present to create the business, the easy format of selling this product. We’ve made it easy enough to use in the South African and world marketplace and have provided some copies for free in order to get some of the less fortunate beginners started. In order to protect those who decide to sell this e-book, we may limit or remove this free offer at any stage.

For those who are merely going to sell this e-book to existing clients, we will be submitting it to www. Clickbank. com as an affiliate product for ease of directing your clients. The process will all be explained at a later stage. For the time being, we are going to focus on the actual step by step business model of creating your own product, or building your website around your chosen product, in this e-book. Good luck and have fun.

The most important factor here is that you grasp the entire process before starting to formulate your business plan. In order to get the big picture, please read through this e-book in its entirety before you start clicking the blue linked text so that you don’t get confused by any sites you may choose to visit. For those of you with minimal internet knowledge, it may sound a little overwhelming and confusing at first, which is why we encourage you to read through the e-book a few times if necessary. When you follow the blue link to Bluevoda, you will arrive at the home page and if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will find the discussion and assistance section to take you to the free website builder which we will be using in our business. Try to join the help section as soon as possible and watch the tutorials guiding you through the web building process. The help forum is very casual and you will find loads of kind hearted folk eager to help the beginners getting to know the software.

This E Book product is the result of years of research into an ever expanding business known as internet marketing.

In order to make this product successful, it was an essential element to establish the website on which you have found this product.

It was a case of sitting down with all the information that I had gathered and speaking closely with friends, family and business associates about where their frustration lay with the E-commerce industry. Most of them had this in common.

Why should I have to pay Dollars for a product that could potentially be available in the South African market for a fraction of the price?

The solution was the following. I decided to set about creating an online business template that could be applied very easily if one had access to the same information that I had gathered over the years.

In the world of Online Marketing there are literally millions of potential clients each and every day, in the marketplace, who are qualified buyers. Where else, except online, can you find this scenario? This is why I have switched over to an Online business for the flexibility that it offers in terms of home business structure and personal time to do the things that you enjoy doing.

Well let’s get started in setting up our new online business.

You will need:

2. What are we going to be doing :

Step 1. Firstly we will figure out how to build an online central place where all our clients can be directed to in order to purchase our product. This is going to be our virtual storefront. We will do this by using our free website builder Bluevoda (click here to see). Remember that the rental for your store should be reasonable. Try and read the whole book first before clicking.

Step 2. We will need to decide on our product or products. Don’t worry if you have not thought of one yet, because you may change your mind as your business takes shape.

Step 3. We will need to name our business in order to refer to it in our marketing and defining our online links back to the website.

Step 4. We will need to provide marketing for the product to create awareness of its availability. This needs to be cost effective or free in order to get your business going.

Step 5. We will also need to become involved in the networks of people with their ears to the ground in terms of new developments regarding marketing online. This will ensure we keep our product in front of the consumer.

Step 6. We will need to make the purchase for our customer as convenient and easy as possible by automating our     website and product system. This will be our product support system.

Our Aim: I will share with you in this e-book the research regarding an online business and any other helpful and relevant topics that you may want to search on your own.

3. Step 1 – Developing a website using a free website builder

Now you may or may not have your product in mind yet, but you will at some stage have to decide on the basic subject matter for your site. Most people will choose something they know in order to have little problem in creating the product review and marketing of the product that follows later. If you decide not to use something you’re familiar with, it is not a problem as the internet is the perfect place to research a topic.

We are going to try and do this though for as little or no cost as possible. It is going to be a great challenge, but it can be done. Read on.

The first thing that you will need to do before you even think of contacting a web-design or web-hosting company is the following:

Take a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and jot down some ideas on the type of items you will like to see on your home page (a. k. a. index page). This will give you some direction on your site map which will enable your customer to navigate their way around your website.

For example you will need to have a “contact us” section, a newsletter or articles section, other sites of interest, space for your heading and site name. Look at the site www. durban-property-searcher. co. za or that of your competitors to give you an idea of possible layout. Whilst researching on the internet you will get some great ideas from other websites in terms of interesting click options in the menu bar on the left hand side or top of the page. Type in your intended product and do a search in the search engine. See what the top 10 “page 1” ranked websites are using in their index (home) page.

By now you are probably on your second sheet of paper and have started to get a vision of what you are trying to create. Make as many notes as possible and keep the names of the sites handy that you think are similar to what you want your website to look like. This is going to give you a better understanding of your concept as you design your websites pages.

Remember to allocate a section of each page to Google advertising and possibly some advertising space in the top right corner for the companies whose products you are offering or some supplementary products to your main product. For example, if your hobby is to make moulds of tin soldiers, you may wish to have paint supplies, brushes, holders for the finished product, magnifying glasses, tweezers etc. as your additional products. You will be amazed at how many suppliers will be interested to be a part of your product marketing campaign.

If you have a site with good content to visitors, the amount of traffic you are generating through your site will be of particular interest to companies who offer products that are complimentary in nature to the products you are selling. This in itself is a revenue stream for you. You can now offer advertising space. Once you have read through the Google Analytics section explained later, you will understand how the search engines will monitor the type of traffic through your site and offer their clients advertising space in the Google Adverts section of your website pages.

This is now your second revenue stream from your website. The first source being your actual product you intend to sell. It is now clear how important it is to plan your site on paper before you go through the cost of employing the service of a web design company if you have chosen to go the more expensive route. You will however need to consider maintaining the relationship with a reputable web company as and when you need to add extra functions to your site. This may include your payment section for your products. One piece of advice that was given to me by a site analyst, was to try not to make the site look like a flea market by implementing all sorts of advertising as it may detract from the effect and reputation you desire from your customers. We have all been zapped suddenly by some sort of advert for an online casino or similar site which changes the whole experience of a site. You are able to prevent these adverts by notifying Google of the types of adverts you wish to exclude from being allowed to display on your website. This step is done when inserting the code into the website for the Google Adsense facility.

There are many free web-builder sites on the internet that will allow you to download a free program, to use to design your new website. We have chosen BlueVoda due to its offering of the free programs needed for this business as opposed to using other web builders which need you to purchase the add-ons separately. Not everybody may wish to use this method. However, the object of this business model is to do it on a budget. Remember how it was mentioned that your start up costs and virtual storefront rental will be determined by the web-hosting company you have decided to use for your business.



Using Bluevoda as your free Website Builder



Should you wish to jump directly to this step to get started, you can go to the BlueVoda site which was used to design the site on which you found this e-book. Their system is a pleasure to work with for the following reasons;

Even though the monthly charge is in Dollars, the conversion still works out much cheaper than South Africa and is irrelevant as the technical support is always via internet anyway, as well as there being no charge for the CMS or Control Management System which you will need to upload new content to your website and also administer any changes you may wish to make to your site. Most South African web hosting companies will not provide this and it is costly to acquire locally. On BlueVoda it is free.

They also send regular emails notifying you of functions you may wish to add to your site.

Last but not least are the video tutorials which give you free step by step video tutorial instruction throughout the site building process which is also free.

An in depth amount of researching was carried out in order to source the easiest method for anyone to do this with little or no knowledge of computers and we hope you have fun in testing different options.

Spend some time gong through their templates until you find one that works well for your intended product or design one from scratch. Please remember to make your site as easy to navigate as possible and get an unbiased opinion from a friend or family member if your colour choices are easy on the eyes to read. This could be the make or break of your site. Blue is always an easy colour on the eyes to read. Just see how your toolbar looks above.





4. Step 2 – Choosing your Product :





The Right Product will have the following Characteristics

The greatest thing about back end products is that you always have a greater profit margin. It happens that as mentioned above, your customers are now more confident in your delivery that your back end products are more successful than your front end product.

So now you have a potential product and a website in progress. A helpful time saver is to copy your heading and menu bars and paste it to each new page you design as you go along so that you only need to do your home page and then when complete you are pasting with all the page-links and characteristics already intact. I learnt the hard way.

5. Step 3 -  Giving your business a name



Securing a domain name

There are many websites which enable you to reserve and purchase domain names. Some consideration will need to be put to the type of domain name that you choose as some domains are specific to certain types of industries similar to the need for a government website to end in a . gov. za. or an organization to end in a . org. za …. . etc.



As mentioned previously, where we prefer to keep the services of an overseas hosting facility as they are able to offer better packages to suit your website function and have larger servers, the opposite is applicable to your domain name.

Although some web-hosting companies do offer a free domain name, it is a lot easier to renew your web domain annually from a local domain registrar and to receive post locally. The complications arrive if and when you may decide to change hosting companies, as it is difficult to show ownership of the domain name when all the important information is held by an overseas company and you need to retrieve hard copies of important documents when it is a few years down the line. For this reason, it also makes decisions easier when you don’t leave the entire control in the hands of an overseas supplier of services. Most local domain registrars will try and convince you to host with them, but they just cannot compete with the offering of the overseas servers’ bandwidth. Maybe in the future this will change for South Africans.

It may be of consideration at this point to remember that a name that has multiple words should be split using a hyphen as it is often unreadable to a user who does not already know your product. For example, the name “durbanpropertysearcher” seems like a bit of gobbledy-gook. However when read as “Durban-property-searcher”, it is more easily read. This will help the search engines allocate merit to your website title as well us the individual words when being searched by a user.









6. Step 4 – Marketing your Product



The 3 General Types of Online Marketing:



You are not limited in terms of how you would like to market your product or products, however, I would recommend that you choose one and try to master it in order to exhaust all the potential opportunities that each type of marketing has and then implement them into your marketing campaign.

The benefit of trying each as an individual concept will enable you to see which methods are working most effectively in your marketing campaign and to decide where your efforts should be focused.

The type of product you have chosen may determine which method would be of more value in its ability to send your prospective clients to your website. You may have different tactics for each product, but remember that the end result is the customer arriving at the place your product is available.

Remember that once you have isolated a winning formula it will become easier to implement each campaign collectively and let your business run on auto-pilot. This is our aim here. We want each product to maintain itself so that you can then duplicate the result with another product. You may learn something on your next product that will increase the potential of your first product. Go back and implement it.

We want to know that each business idea is only the cost of the hosting each month which should not cost more than R 100. 00 plus Vat as we can design our sites now for free. Sure the domain name may cost a few rand, but it is owned by you now and can be sold later if not used.

Internet Marketing

I want you to keep foremost in your thoughts that this type of marketing is invaluable because of the nature of the World Wide Web. The internet is a priceless form of marketing in that anybody can offer their products to a world market. For now though, we want to stay local whilst we set up. Fortunately, the effort that is put into your marketing invariably will remain there until such time as you decide to delete it. What I mean here is that your product may be found by a customer on the internet in 5 years from now and if you have created your business to accept them as a client indefinitely, they will still be able to generate a profit margin for you. This example is to show you what type of potential your business has and to enable you to decide about the level of effort you can put into it. You may decide to work flat out for 6 months and take a break if you are happy with your cash-flow statement, or even retire after 5 years of establishing your campaigns and let the business run itself. This is the joy of having a virtual business in that it is accessible from anywhere, at any time of the day and it allows flexibility of time management.

Direct reponse Marketing

Once your have generated interest with your customer, they will need to be able to correspond with you or provide you with a means to contact them. This is a request for more information on your product. You may now include the option to purchase your product at the end of your information presentation of the product. Most websites will have a page that allows a customer to opt in to a mailing list for future contact. This request from the customer will usually stem from a blog which we will be discussing or possibly a post on a bulletin board or other advert that you have used in your campaign. This will be the foundation of your business as you will need to be able to offer future products to these potential customers. You may have a newsletter that you wish to send out to your mailing list with your latest products. Remember that it will become integral to establish an automated system eventually to take care of this scenario. As your business grows, you will need to surround yourself with the right systems to take care of your business when you cannot. These are potentially lost sales.

Direct Mail Marketing



South Africa seems to have forgotten the effectiveness of a well written postcard. Direct mail marketing could be the only method that you decide to use in your campaign if you need to market directly within your neighborhood. Your product may be such that you have a well established network already and just need to direct these potential clients to your new website. Do you remember the days when you got back to your car at a shopping centre and it was covered in flyers. Do you find that you will more likely take a flyer from somebody at a traffic intersection if they are wearing a T-shirt with the logo of the product that they are promoting. By the time you arrive at the person who is handing out the flyer, you already know that it may be of interest to you and you gladly request more information by taking a flyer. This shows willingness to buy. By capturing the market and directing them to your website, they are able to consider their purchase in comfort and obtain the important aspects of the product. Remember that marketing is really a teaser in essence and the first step in the sales process. Most consumers rarely buy on first inspection unless they already know the product. Try not to sell within your marketing campaign. Traffic to your website is the key to its success.

Affiliate marketing



Affiliate marketing is a mutli-billion Rand industry worldwide and has been the saving grace for many an internet savvy person. We are going to attempt to provide a broad understanding of this subject in order for you to decide if this avenue is something that you would like to try as an additional or alternative means to generate a passive and/or secondary income.

This is by no means a miracle cure to financial freedom and does take an intense amount of research and writing in order to remain in the top 10% of internet affiliate marketers.

The basic principle of affiliate marketing is such that a company or individual provides their product to a marketplace whereby affiliate marketers are able to offer such product to consumers in exchange for a percentage of the sales price received by the company/individual selling the product. In essence an affiliate marketer will carry the risk in terms of advertising costs and use various internet marketing strategies to channel potential buyers to where the product is offered.

In South Africa there are currently only two companies that I would recommend as having properly entered the market in terms of offering local South African internet affiliate marketers a Rand based product that they could sell. I encourage you to look at the potential offered on www. trafficsynergy. co. za and www. offerforge. co. za.

We are going to be setting up your business to cater for the local market and as such would like to stay away from the overseas based Dollar and Pound markets for now. We will briefly discuss Clickbank as an overseas marketplace to source products, purely for information purposes. If you choose to attempt to enter this market, I wish you only the best of luck but have noticed a lack of activity in our local market and am confident that we are still in the beginning stages of this trend in our country. Finally a market we can get into at ground level.

Some of the products mentioned on Offerforge and TrafficSynergy, you may recognise from www. durban-property-searcher. co. za. It is a good idea to decide for yourself which of the advertisers you wish to exclude from your website as some of them may not be relevant to your product offering and may discourage your customers if they feel that the adverts are confusing to your site content. As the site that I have developed is a business site and is reliant on a specific provincial marketplace, it is suitable to offer air flights and accommodation advertisements on the website. This is a recurring income for as long as the site is active and the company is an affiliate advertising partner.

Due to a recession type of attitude in the corporate environment at present, it is a great way for companies with budget restraints to use affiliate marketers as they will only need to pay on successfully concluded sales and as such is a win-win for everybody. As this is still in its infant stages in South Africa, I believe that it is only a matter of time before the majority of larger corporate advertisers follow suit and the SME business firms realise that this is a strong mode of advertising within a reasonable budget. It means that those wishing to begin changing the way in which we approach a work from home opportunity and online income, will be able to establish themselves now for the new trend taking off in South Africa.

So let’s recap on your income stream. You have paid advertising space being assigned on your website by Google through your Adsense campaign. We have an allocated space for permanent advertisers on each webpage in your website who may be in the same or a similar field to that in which your chosen product is located. You have the actual product sales themselves which have increased by using your various advertising campaigns. We have also covered a means to build a client base for continual sales of additional products by using the auto-responder.

You can find the program for your auto responder in your Bluevoda Cpanel (control panel). Hopefully by now you have designed your fist page and are reading this e-book for the second or third time making new notes as you go along.





7. Generating Traffic To Your Website



Foundational Business Building

This type of traffic is meant to establish your foundation and solidify your spot on the internet. Foundational Traffic is more time consuming to do, but is extremely effective at delivering really qualified traffic to your business. The more you stick to doing it, the more stable your business will become for the long term.

Here are some basic methods of Foundational Traffic.

Articles:



Article marketing is a way of marketing yourself as an authority online. When you are promoting your business products using internet based marketing techniques, you are able to redirect traffic online to your business website where you then make sales. Always remember to try and use an information capture sheet on your website to enable you to record the details of the visitors to your website. This is extremely valuable to add to your mailing list so that you are able to introduce secondary products to your visitors at a later date. Just keep building your list of prospective clients.

Try some of these ideas to start with. You will be provided with some websites later on to help you get started.



This is one of the most easiest things to write about because it is highlighting your core products and the business that you offer people. What can you do for them? Remember your aim is to add value and content.



People like to read articles of interest from like minded people. There are many forums and discussion groups out there that rely on regular support to expand and maintain their reader base. It is often found that these discussions lead to business support and backlinks are created to and from each others websites. Remember its all about traffic to your website.



It is always wise to choose a product that relates to your passion easily. This will enable you to speak passionately in your articles and discussion groups from the heart. It will also enable you to link with other websites that interest you.

There are many reasons for which you should create articles as a direct marketing technique, but the most common is probably for a boost in site traffic. You may not yet realise how much good this type of direct marketing can do, but if you focus on a couple of hours a day and get some great articles going, then you are well on your way to creating a great traffic driving machine, just from articles.

Remember that if you are already writing them for discussion groups, you may as well not duplicate the work, but save them to a section of your website called “other topics of interest” or the likes.

You may also want to add your websites’ hyperlink to the bottom of each article and submit them to e-zines websites for other website owners to use them as content. This will create valuable links back to your website giving you excellent search engine optimization by moving your pages up in rank to the first few pages for keyword searches by online users.

www. Ezinearticle. com

www. Goarticles. com

www. Articledashboard. com

www. Searchwarp. com

www. Articlebase. com

www. Isnare. com

www. Selfgrowth. com

www. Buzzle. com

www. Articlecity. com

www. Ideamarketers. com

www. Articlealley. com

www. Web-source. net

www. Selfseo. com

www. Amazines. com

www. Articletrader. com

www. Searchguild. com

www. Webworldindex. com

www. Articlesphere. com

www. Businessknowhow. com

www. Promotionworld. com

www. Articlesfactory. com

www. Excellentguide. com/article

www. Contentdesk. com

www. Articlecube. com

www. Articlebiz. com



Blogs and other means of Social Networking



Blog is a shortened word for web log. A blog is a form of an online journal wherein you get to write whatever you feel like writing about at that moment. If you have a blog that is both interesting and informative, you will find that a regular reader base will start to emerge as readers enjoy your writing.

The reason why a blog is such a great means to market your products and services is that you are able to reach a wider audience, build a community of loyal readers, interact with them, create market awareness and even enter into a bit of pre-launch hype for your products.

This clearly shows that a Blog is more than an online diary. Blogs work as a marketing tool because they are interactive. They allow you to share information with your visitors on a regular and personal basis. This method is also extremely beneficial for feedback as your visitors are able to leave a comment on your Blog.   This communication process turns the Blog into a forum and discussion platform which allows you to showcase your expertise in a certain field and discuss your products and your business.

BlueVoda has included a free blogging platform or choice of Bulletin Board style called phpbb which you can incorporate into your new website. You will find this in your CPanel (Control Panel). Use this Blog as a forum for introducing experts in the field that your product is sold or traded. This adds substance to your content and is looked upon by the search engines as beneficial to readers. Your Page ranking on the internet search engines will improve and you will be able to ensure that you stay in the top ten on the first page so that your customers will be able to find your site effortlessly.

As with your articles, you may wish to submit your blog entries for reference to the search engines which may generate traffic as people read your blog posts on other sites.   Some webmasters may choose to use your articles as content. Make sure to include your signature in the form of your website or page address in the section provided at the bottom of a blogpost or article. This signature will send highly qualified and interested clients to your products and website.

Try out,

www. Squidoo. com

www. Hubpages. com

www. Wetpaint. com

www. Bumpzee. com

www. Quizilla. com

www. Experienceproject. com

www. Clipmarks. com

www. Blogowogo. com

www. Weebly. com

www. Tumblr. com

www. Terapad. com

www. Pownce. com

www. Jaiku. com

www. Usfreeads. com

www. Scribd. com

www. Slideshare. net

as a means to create extra signatures referring traffic back to your products. The search engines will credit your website with better page ranking as they find more and more sites with your website name on it as it shows qualification in your content written.

Viral marketing

Viral marketing is the internet term given to word of mouth type of marketing by those who have found interest in your articles or products and is by far the best method to increase exposure of your product. It stands to reason that a product you believe in is always the first one that you would recommend to friends and family. If you are writing sincere product reviews for your products in your blogging and article campaigns, you will most definitely have others on the internet placing great value on what you have written and thus receive many links to your page and indirectly boost your page ranking in the search engines for your product.





Free advertising websites and Bulletin Boards



There are too many sites to mention and it would be easier to find those in your home town or area of your target market by just typing free classifieds into the search engine and adding your town name thereafter.



Backlinks from other sites



There are various companies who offer an exchange link system or often called reciprocal links which you can obtain to increase the number of links pointing back to your website. This is a means of search engine optimization and does help to a certain degree in increasing your page ranking in the search engine for certain keyword searches which will put you in the top 10.

See which back links your opposition have on their website and approach the same or similar companies for their assistance in linking to your site. They are not in competition and would wish to sell their own products and thus the more the merrier. You never know unless you try.

RSS Feeds and RSS Feed Aggregators



One often overlooked tactic is the use of a blog RSS Feed syndication. Simply put, every time you update your blog, a subscriber is notified by your registering the blog with a RSS Feed Aggregator.

There are many RSS Feed Aggregators online for you to choose from. The easiest blog or discussion template to use is probably the one that comes free with the BlueVoda Webbuilder package which is a wordpress blog platform. The platform has numerous plug in products available for free in cyberspace and a simple search will reveal these plug-ins which allow customization of the function and appearance thereof.

If you are using a wordpress blog, your feed address is simply;

www. yoursite. co. za/blogdirectory/feed

Where “yoursite” is the name of your website and “blogdirectory” is the name of the directory where your blog is located on your website. For page naming, there is a wonderful tutorial in the BlueVoda webbuilder.

This is a list of some of the more preferred RSS Feed Aggregators and they are all free to submit to. You will only need to submit your blog to them once and they will update automatically every time you add content to your blog.



Search engines



Please remember that whilst Google has over 200 million users on any given day, this is not the only search engine which is being used throughout South Africa and the rest of the world.

For this reason it is wise to submit your website to as many search engines as possible in order to increase your traffic analytics to your site. Think Yahoo, MSN and so forth. The list is endless. Just Google Search engines and see what comes up. But remember that there are more pages than the first 10 results and you may want to go through them at your own pace. This is an ongoing process and you cannot be expected to do everything in one day. After all, this e-book took three months to put together.

Newspaper publications and other means of advertising



Gumtree. What can I say? Most South Africans have heard of Gumtree and Junkmail. If you have not heard of the free advertising newspaper publication or classifieds website, you are missing out on a load of free advertising. A recent advertisement that was placed on Gumtree netted a response of 250 people in the first hour. These were the replies by email, nevermind how many times the advert was viewed.

As South Africans we are fortunate to have so many diverse cultural backgrounds that the number of ideas we can imagine are boundless. Each and every community uses some form of publication that is extremely cost effective to run an advertising campaign. The fortunate fact is that in the past it was necessary to utilize full colour advertisements in an advertising campaign, whereas now we are able to utilize our websites for the glossy supplements and merely direct the consumers to our websites. You don’t need to be extravagant with your advertising budget to generate interest in your products.

I am honestly amazed at how few cars have their website address across their rear window or rear bumper in a world that’s crying recession. We are going to think out of the box in this business plan.

Clickbank



Clickbank was possibly one of the first and most popular marketplaces for affiliate marketers to use on a regular basis to obtain products for their Google Ads campaigns. It was found however, that during the compilation of this e-book, the majority if not all of the products offered on Clickbank are for the overseas market. By this statement we mean that as mentioned earlier, it is extremely difficult as a South African to attempt to sell a product on a local website that is paid for in Dollars. We strongly recommended Offerforge and TrafficSynergy for this reason and hope that in the immediate future more local product members join up and understand the concept of utilizing affiliate marketers in this country. We also believe that Cape Town based company Adgator is helpful in being able to monetize your blog. Perhaps the introduction of an undersea cable system due to improve bandwidth and internet accessibility in South Africa in July 2009 is the key to this.



If you have decided to use a . com website address as opposed to a . co. za website address, then Clickbank might appeal to you as you are able to use a . com address a lot easier in the international marketplace. The product you have chosen may be easily accepted by international consumers and as such it may make no difference if your secondary products are sold in Dollars.

If you are interested in the affiliate type of marketing, then a simple entry of your desired product followed by the words “affiliate program” or “associate program” will reveal companies that offer affiliate marketers the opportunity to market their products.



Some additional information on using Google Adwords for Affiliate marketing

Google Adwords are the short 4 line advertisements as mentioned earlier which you may wish to allow Google to display on your website for an additional revenue stream. Some of these adverts are placed by internet affiliate marketers attempting to direct traffic to a site where a product is sold. The affiliate marketer is paid a commission for each sale that the owner of the product makes. This is the other side of the coin to Google Adsense.

As this is a paid service which is offered by Google, there may be a profit margin in it if the affiliate marketer is able to sell a product for more than it costs to display the advert somewhere on the internet.

In the same way that a searcher uses keywords to find the relevant pages for their search in the search engine, the affiliate marketer will pay a certain amount to have their advert displayed on the side of the page for that particular set of keywords or a website allowing Google Adsense.

This method is sometimes enough to generate a substantial income, but does carry some risk in that a sale is not always guaranteed every time somebody clicks on your advert and the costs of running multiple advertising campaigns can quickly add up.

The Google Adwords service works on a bidding system whereby the affiliate marketer will bid a certain number of cents and sometimes Rands for highly successful keywords, for each time that someone clicks on their advert.

If this method is of interest, then we would suggest investigation into the following;

Keyword search tools such as

www. overture. com

www. wordtracker. com

www. googlekeyword. com

www. keyworddiscovery. com and

www. keywordelite. com

You can also use www. adwordanalyzer. com to determine the number of keywords bid on for a specific topic and use this to find a landing page that you can copy for your product.

You can also use this sales copy landing page to build your list for backend sales. This topic has a large amount of detail and is an entire e-book on its own. We will not go too in-depth into this at the moment as this topic is discussed in more detail on the discussion forum which we encourage you to join for help with creating your online business. Log in at www. durban-property-searcher. co. za/online-marketing-discussion-forum. html

8. Step 5 -  Keeping up to date on New Trends and  Product Improvement



Below are a couple of forums which you my wish to investigate as they are updated regularly and also follow trends in the industry as far as search engine optimization go.

www. maketingterms. com- Online Marketing terms and useful links

www. seochat. com – SEO forum and seo tools

www. searchenginewatch. com – search engine optimisation

www. alltop. com – a site focusing on current world buying trends http//:tools. seobook. com  – a site on keyword analysis for your marketing campaigns

www. blogger. com – a free blogging platform

www. iblog. co. za – a free south African blogging platform

www. blogspot. com – a free blogging platform

www. twitter. com – the latest in social blogging media

Some more great ideas for promoting your products



Create a review page for the products you are selling so that you can write a bit about each product. This product review behaves like multiple sales pages all rolled into one on a single review page. Your customers could be able to rate or rank your choices of a selection of products. The interesting thing is that all the products sell, just some better than others. It’s all good for your business. This allows you to sell similar products without being biased to your customers. If they wish to obtain a certain brand name, they can. They key is that they obtain their products from you and your business.

If you are using affiliate programs for your secondary products, make sure to carry out your research on the products home pages or even purchase and test them before hand to enable you to write honestly about them.

If you set up one review page on your website a week and of the 7-10 products on that review page even one of the products is effective and sells, you get a passive income of let’s say R500 per month and you do this for a year, by the end of year 1 you will have 52 review pages on your website with say an average of R500 per month from each review page, you now have a passive income of R26 000 from 52 review pages per month and climbing. Once you have the formula, you merely plug in and play the products.

You will recall that it is not merely the number of products you have though, but the act of creating the marketing support for those review pages by talking about them in your articles.

Search engine optimization



There are many schools of thought on what makes for good search engine optimization. This term has and still is much debated in various forums and Blogs on the internet. Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as it is more commonly known, refers to the ability for the search engines to find your website and provide it in the first page of a search for your clients to be able to find you easily if their keyword search describes your product.

Search engines allocate a page rank to your website as and how it determines the relevance of your content and products to be for those specific keywords. This means that for a specific set of keywords, your website may appear on page 1 and for a different set of keywords, your website may be found on page 100. This has given rise to a culture of trying to ensure that your website is optimized to appear at the top or on page 1 of all search keywords relating to your product or content.

Once you have read the section on Google Analytics you will have an understanding of page ranking with search engines. The one school of thought relating to optimization is to flood your site with backlinks to other websites in order to boost the amount of content that you are able to offer or link to in order to assume huge amounts of traffic through your site.

I feel that this is flawed in that it detracts from the impression you will be creating for you customer base as a website. The customer wants to know that it is easy to navigate and find the suitable subject related content for which they might be searching without being directed to another site where your product can be found. The traffic is not the only criteria by which a website is ranked and much importance is placed on the subject content.





Google Analytics



Google Analytics is the means by which Google is able to monitor the amount and type of traffic which reaches your website. Originally it was an internet company which offered this service for a small fee to website owners in order to ascertain where their customer base was originating from and what type of customers they were. This tool was eventually bought by Google and is now offered as a free service in order to improve their offering as a search engine.

Once your website is place on the World Wide Web, it is imperative that you sign up for this free service as it is able to provide you with a tremendous amount of helpful and useful information regarding your customer base and visitors to your site. This is the basis for analysis which gives you your page ranking and inadvertently your profit margins.

The system works by a code which Google provides to you on signup which is implemented into each page on your website. This is an invisible code which is used on a daily basis by the Spiders and Searchbots ( Googles’ analysis programs) which invariably identify any changes in your website. This may be the IP addresses of your visitors computers needed to determine what type of Adsense to use for their geographical location. It may also determine what pages are most visited which is useful for your marketing strategy improvement. You will also want the Search engine to know immediately of any new content which you have placed on your website. Imagine if at the same time a search engine user is typing in their keywords, you have just uploaded a new product catalogue which has the product  which they are searching for, you would want them to know about it. It’s genius. I love it and it’s free to all website owners.





Google adwords



If you were to search for an item or subject matter on Google for example, you will notice a shaded area at the top of the search results. There are usually only three websites listed for each page of search results. These website owners are making use of a tool offered by Google which provides a bidding system for each of the keyword (search words) that you have typed into the search bar in order to arrive at the resultant website list. The tool is called Google Adwords and is available to anybody who wishes to pay per word that users may use to find their product. Over time this can build awareness for your website, but can be a costly exercise if no sales are made to counteract the cost of Adwords advertising campaigns. The entry level is a minimum of a R500 budget allocation upfront and R50 activation cost.





Google adsense

Using the same example as used in the Google Adwords search, you will note that some advertisements appear in the right hand side of your screen. These are Google Adsense campaigns and work on a similar bidding system for the keywords that someone may use to search for a product or subject matter. These advertisements are however only billed to the advertiser on a pay per click system which means that only once someone clicks on the relevant four line advert which directs the searcher to their website, will Google bill the advertiser for that searcher to click through. This method requires constant monitoring in order to maintain the advert on the first page by ensuring bids for each keyword is in the top four bids. Some advertisers will purposefully try to be the forth or fifth advertiser as this is a persons natural line of site to be searching in the middle of the page.





9. Step 6: Support systems

In order to be successful in business, it is imperative that as you grow your business, you start to implement systems which will improve, if not maintain, your levels of service and quality to your customers. This will lead to automation of your website activities and client correspondence by using an auto-responder which allows you to pre-write your email responses to an action that takes place, e. g. an order for your product.

If for example you are spending time in a banking hall queue unnecessarily, you may decide to implement internet banking in order to carry out your business at home. It is also critical to understand that if your product is downloadable, it is a benefit to a customer who wants it now. This reason is why many online sales are focused on internet based products or product delivery handled by a third party.

The idea is that you continuously research and find better methods for running your business and also try to establish contacts who think similarly to you in terms of business. I am not saying that you need to reveal your secrets, but it often occurs that the best ideas are generated by like minded individuals discussing strategies and new products they have found to be successful or even unsuccessful.





Opt in pages  and Lead Capture Pages



The basic idea of the opt in page is to build your data base of clients and their email addresses to enable you to keep them updated on any new product offerings that you have, any new ideas or even as a support mechanism for the products they have purchased from you. In the autoresponder section you will be able to add an email that you would like to send to your database of clients all at once. Now if you have thousands of clients in your database, you can not possibly spend the time keeping them individually informed.

So the Opt in page and lead capture is designed to capture your new clients information at your first point of contact.

We will need to create a page for this using a page creator asking for their name and primary email address.

In order to get your clients to give this information freely as some people are scared of receiving large amounts of spam, you may want to provide some information in exchange for this, maybe a free report, a software program, a discount coupon for your products etc.

Use www. instantsqueezepagegenerator. com to build squeeze pages and use one of their free offers to get the opt ins or use www. resalerocket. com for free giveaways.

You may also try to use re-brandable e-books and products so that you can insert your own affiliate links to have multiple potential sales portals around cyberspace as you build your own business. Get tips on how to design your squeeze page for maximum use by visiting some of the Google Adsense adverts in your product field. Try to identify the call to action and see if they have used a nice picture of the product etc.

If you would like to use the traditional opt-in page, go to your BlueVoda control panel and use the email section to set up the email capturer and plug in a message to your auto responder to reply to the sender of their email, in very much the same way that you downloaded this e-book.

Building your list



You may want to use this e-book as your free download or be able to help friends and family get started once you are happy that you are well on your way to creating your own business.

You may wish to set up a means where people can ask you how you made money eg. a blog and then monetize it using Adgator.

Thank you pages

Make sure you send all your new subscribers a welcome or thank you email and stay in contact once a week if you can. You may decide to send your mail out on a Friday so that customers can view your products in the comfort of their own home on a weekend without the pressures of their work. Statistics show that most sales occur from personal home computers as opposed to during office hours.

You may even decide to create a learning forum for new-comers as a follow-up to the downloaded purchase. This can be plugged in to the auto-responder as a link to a forum or blog on your website

Let your new clients know you have an open door policy by providing a personal email address or help line for your products.

The Sales page



Your products should never be sold in your marketing campaigns. Always try to have a sales page on your website incorporating the information regarding the purchase process of your product.

The sales page is your call to action for your client. They are on your sales page because they have shown an interest in your articles or content. They are now here to buy. Give them the facts and the instructions necessary to purchase your product. Once they have purchased, you can now direct them to your thank you page. Keep it simple.

10. Tips for your email autoresponder



After your first email, you need to try and gauge at what stage your subscribers or customers will be in your product offering. This will be helpful to them when they open their most recent email to find some more useful information.

Try to never include more than one product in your email as it becomes confusing to find the link to the information that you are suggesting. It also starts to take on a spam feel and may irritate your customers. Keep your system consistent in your offerings.

Rather send a secondary email. Make sure that your customers look forward to receiving you email.

If they get u

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From SEO for the Average Joe @ www.seofortheaveragejoe.com A short SEO video tutorial on how to easily optimize internal linking using a simple SEO strategy and an Excel spreadsheet. One of the most underutilized, yet highly impactful, SEO strategies is optimizing your internal links and site navigation. An easy and effective way to do this is to use targeted keywords within the link text and navigation throughout a web site or blog. Like so many SEO tactics, this simple improvement will …

Search Engine Optimisation is becoming increasingly important in today’s marketplace. Would you like to do your own SEO? If the answer’s yes, let’s begin.
*** Choose the right keywords ***
Identify the most popular keywords for your site using web and PPC data. Try the SEO Keyword Generator at http://www. searchengineoptimising. com/keyword_generators/overture. htm, the Google Keyword Tool at https://adwords. google. com/select/KeywordToolExternal, or the free trail of WebCeo avilable at http://www. webceo. com (Trail has a 5 keyword limit).
Use the information gathered to estimate the likely conversion ratios or use some pay per click advertising to identify your best performing keywords.
*** Optimise your Site ***
1. Get your best keywords inside the title, h1, h2, tags and menu items. You can also use bold to place emphasis on your keywords. Target 1 to 3 keywords per page.
2. Make sure there is no duplicate content. For example, does http://example. com and http://www. example. com show your pages but act as separate sites? If so, add a redirect to your . htacess file to redirect http://example. com to http://www. example. com.
3. Use mod_rewrite for dynamic pages to show them as static. Ensure they all have at least the title, description and keyword meta tags.
4. Ensure there is a good internal linking structure: Ensure links are visible in source code. Do not use JavaScript. It is possible to use a combination of CCS and JavaScript to produce attractive search engine friendly menus. For example, http://www. htmldog. com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/example/
5. Check for and fix broken links: Try: http://validator. w3. org/checklink
6. Ensure your HTML and CSS Validates. Try: http://validator. w3. org
*** Build Links ***
Now that you have a search engine friendly site, it is all about getting links.
1. Check the back links of your competitors and get your link where you can. Yahoo provides a much more complete list than google type links:www. yourcompetitorsaddress. com into the search box at http://www. yahoo. com.
2. Do whatever possible to get authority links. Link bait such as free tools, free guides or tutorials will make it easier.
3. Submit your site to web directories. A good search engine friendly list can be found at http://info. vilesilencer. com/seo-friendly-list. xls.
4. Write Articles and submit them to as many sites as possible. Don’t forget to add a link to your site in the Author section.
5. Use social networking sites, blogs and forums to build links to your site.
*** Keep the Link Juice Flowing! ***
If you ever need to change the domain, the structure or a web address within your site always implement a 301 Permanent Redirect, that way you can make the changes without risking your hard earned SEO results.
For an entire site: Redirect 301 / http://www. example. com
Just a folder: Redirect 301 /olddirectory http://www. example. com/newdirectory
Just a page: Redirect 301 /oldpage1. html http://www. example. com/newpage1. html

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