I’ve spent the last couple hours thinking about where I want to be at the end of this year. Last year was a tough year for me as the business grew faster than I was able to keep up with. This has caused me to have to regroup and rethink my next moves.

1. Customer service has to be at the front. There is nothing I’ll ever do with my business that will be more important than customer service.

2. Never ever stop. There are times when I want to through my hands up and walk away; those are the times I need to work my hardest.

3. Never lose my cool. No matter what the problem always remember that no one is getting out alive. It’s all just a game.

4. Simple is always better.

5. Plan, strategize, and organize before making any moves.

6. Answer every email in person; never try to automate an opportunity to communicate.

7. Never try to sell anything, just be a friend.

8. Target a market and go after it, do not try and conquer the whole internet.

9. Always remember that internet marketing is nothing more than common sense and persistence will always win.

10. Never play for the money; it’s all about the business.

11. Track everything

12. Work at making my website stupid proof.

13. Network more.

14. Start an affiliate program.

15. Write a contract for every job.  

Silicone Bracelets

I’ve been working with a silicone bracelet site for the last two months and I’ve had quite a time with it. The biggest problem is that none of the search terms will bring in enough traffic to amount to a whole lot. I’ve thought about this a good bit and decided to create sub-domain names and try and come up with a couple search terms for each of the sub-domain names.

A couple of the sub-domain names are a lot closer to being finished but I decided to start marketing the bracelet sub-domain name first because I felt it would be able to bring in more traffic then the others. Some of the search terms we came up with should be fairly easy to rank for like Buy Bracelets, Basics Bracelets, Attractive Bracelets, Create a Bracelet and many others.

I want to see if I can get the search terms showing up in the search engines in the next 7 days as well as get the sub-domain name to get 2,000 unique visitors per day in the next 7 days.

I’ve got nothing against Edelman or Wal-Mart but 101 Dumbest Moments in Business has got Wal-Mart and Edelman listed as #1 on the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business.

#2 is none other than Northwest Airlines who handed out a book to their employees “101 Ways to Save Money” and then started laying them off. The book talked about not being ashamed of diving in a dumpster if you see something you like.

#3 was McDonald’s who gave away MP3 players in Japan that came with their very own family of Trojan horse viruses, when loaded to the computer they capture passwords, user names, and other data and then forward them to hackers.

There are some pretty good ones in the list, if you have time you should check out the site.

It’s important that you understand, while you need a good design and name that will help you stand out from the competition, your site visitor could really careless about your design. The site visitor is there to serve their need.

They are either looking for information, to purchase a product or to be entertained. Your site design should help them meet their needs, while at the same time branding your business into their minds. Adding unnecessary flash and moving text into the design because you think it looks neat, is not going to do this.

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It’s important that your design stands out from the competition. If someone lands on your site today and returns tomorrow you want them to remember your site and not wonder rather they’ve been there before.

The design needs to blow away the competition while at the same time being clean and easy to use.

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I’ve never been a big fan of blogs, due to the fact that they display each post in reverse chronological order. If you write part 1 of an article and later write part 2 then part 2 ends up on top of part 1. But here lately I’ve been hearing about this guy that goes by the name of Perez Hilton.

Perez Hilton has become quite famous due to his blog. He made in excess of $100,000.00 last year blogging, as well as building quite a name for himself. My understanding is that he started out totally broke and I’ve even herd rumors that he was homeless. Either way I was intrigued by his story and decided to spend some time studying his blog.

Perez Hilton will make as many as 24 post or more per day. You can start reading one page and by the time you get to the bottom of that page you can hit refresh and start over. Most of his post are short and include a picture. To give you an idea of the amount of traffic he gets, his website served over 3.97 million unique visitors in a 24 hour period.

The short post and pictures keep you reading. If you write a long article most people want read all the way to the end, but short little post are easy to read and if there interesting, people will read more of your post and even continue on to page 2. The number of post are equally important, the blog is pinging other websites while at the same time getting picked up on the search engines for all the different keywords in each post. Enough posting per day and it is just a matter of time before someone takes notice.

I’ve started playing with this a little in the last week. Step one was finding a topic that I felt I could make 20 post a day or more about. I feel like I can do this on my Bible blog and think that I can find enough information and I’m interested enough in the topic that with some effort on my part I can make the 20 post per day mark. I posted a little but found the same problem I’ve always had with blogs and that is that my last post shows up first. But I found a way around this, by creating a page and then putting links at the bottom of the page to each of my post, I’m able to write and put things in the order I want them to show in.

But because I’m writing about the Bible there was the problem of writing short post and being able to show Bible proof for each of my post. The post become long and are no longer short little post. I’ve now figured out a way to work around this, I place a little link that when clicked on opens a new window with the Bible proof.

The next problem is in finding pictures for each of my post. Its time consuming and all most impossible to find the pictures online. I’ve decided to hire an artist whose only job will be drawing pictures for my post, I’m interviewing people for that job as I write this post.

The last step is the design. I’ve got my guys playing with the design now. I want something that is different from all the other Bible sites that are online. If you land on my site I don’t want you to have to wonder if you’ve been there before.

As I workout both of the above problems I’m going to go ahead and move forward with the project. I’m going to attempt to make 20 short post everyday on the blog and see if just making these post, is enough to get the site to getting thousands of visitors per a day. In case anyone is wondering the blog was not getting any visitors when I started. I have started getting some links to the blog but I’m trying to get a couple 1,000 visitors per day so I’ll need some links to get the search engines interested in what is going on.

I’m also going to do the same with JanethD.com but will have Magda one of the girls here in the office making the 20 post per day on that blog along with myself. There has been a small change in plans, we are going to use Magdda.com instead of Janethd.com.

I just wrote and article about Social Bookmarking Sites and how to get traffic from them.

There are people getting 10,000 visitors a day from sites like these. The site were I wrote the article is brand new and I’m working on it now but the whole site is dedicated to SMO. If you get some time it might be worth a read. Wink

A member of WPW, JuniorOnline, posted a link earlier today to an article about SMO (Social Media Optimization). I wonder how many people are aware of the money that can be made with SMO as compared to SEO?

SMO is not about getting a number one ranking on the search engines but more about building a site worth talking about. The end goal is not only getting traffic from forums, blogs, Digg and other Social Media places but building a name for yourself as well.

Our site has some pretty good ranking in the search engines but we make more money from building websites for members of forums like WPW then we do anywhere else.

I’m going to try and explain whats worked for me.

1. I love helping people and have probably built over 100 websites for free, my intention was not to get anything in return but many of these people have posted links to my site as well as sent me family and friends as clients.

If I was making a how to list #1 would be always have your heart in the right place. Post on forums to help people and not to promote your own business.

2. I’ve learned more on forums then anywhere else. Everyone knows more about something then you do. Try and learn something from everyone you meet.

3. Always try and improve your website. You should not be making self promotional post on forums, you’ve got one shot to make the sell and that’s through your website. Always try and improve your design, text, logo and images as well as the way your site operates.

One of the hardest things for me to learn was how to take criticism on my own website. Now I’m glad to have the opportunity to fix something I may not have seen before.

If your going to make money on forums your website needs to be the best, there is a lot of competition on forums.

4. Debates are good but never let them get personal. I had a lot of problems learning how to debate a topic with-out letting it get personal.

5. Bad information, I think a lot of people post bad information just to get people posting on a topic they started. I would never do this, it not only makes you look bad but also causes people to become confused about the topic being talked about.

At the end of the day you end up with links pointing to your site from forums, blogs and other websites talking about something you’ve said or done.

This helps your website rank in the search engines not because of link exchanges or submitting your site to directories but because you were out helping someone.

When your website does rank it’s the best it can be, you’ve been improving it everyday to help sell your product or service, while your competition has been submitting there site to directories and doing link exchanges.

You’ve also been making money from day one instead of worrying about the search engines and were you rank.

People need to forget about the search engines and start learning how to make money online.

Your Goal: Make Your Ads Look Less Like Ads

The biggest problem facing AdSense is “banner Blindness” so it’s important that your ads looks less like ads and equally important that your ads are located in the right places.

Sounds a little shady.

Let’s start with the ads location.
The most important part of any web page is the center and your title header. So it’s important that we place one set of ads under our title header and run them from left to right.

You want to run the ads again in the middle of your article. In most cases people leave after reading a little of what you have to say, by the time they reach the middle of your article they may be ready for something different.

And I’d run the ads down the left side of the page above your navigation and try to make the ads look as much like the navigation links as you can.

“Blending The Ads In”

The border color and background color of these ads should match the background color of your page. This helps the ads blend into the page and look less like ads.

The links for these ads should be a little darker then your standard blue (#000080) but the link for the advertiser’s url should be something that does not stand out.

The rest of your site should use link colors that are not the traditional blue and ones that blends into the site and do not stand out.

This will make the AdSense links stand out more on the page then any of the other links, but you should also use the same darker shade of blue (#000080) links for your navigation. You want the AdSense links to look like navigation links and not ad links.

What to expect from your site.

Friday is normally a bad day because everyone is getting ready for the weekend while Sunday is normally the best day because everyone is hanging around the house with nothing to do and waiting to go back to work.

The search engines that convert the best are in order are

MSN
Dog Pile
Yahoo
My Web Search
Earthlink
AOL
At the bottom of the list is
Google

“A New Way To Buy Links”

I'm not sure how many people have herd of or taken the time to take a look at the www.payperpost.com site.

The idea beyond the site is a good one, your able to pay a group of bloggers to blog about your site or product.

Lets say you have just added a new forum to your site and want to get the word out. You can pay around $10.00 per post and have bloggers blogging about your new forum.

But here's what I see happening.

Anything that can be used for good can also be used for bad.

Let's say I have a new dating site and need to get links to the dating site. All I have to do is sign up and get the bloggers to blog about my new dating site.

I can even tell them what link I want to use.

Before long I have 10,000 or 20,000 links coming to my site from bloggers.

Now if we add in the recent Wal-Mart scandal along with the recent Google Bombing, it's easy to see a trend coming on that Google will have to do something about.

I'm thinking that blogs may not work as well as they currently work on Google by the end of 2007.