I’m going to take you through the steps I would take if I was starting a business from scratch.

On the Internet there’s nothing written in stone and everything is constantly changing. So everything that follows from this point on is nothing more than my opinion of how I would set up a business online.

With that being said I’ve been making my total living online for the last 10 years and have had projects that were really successful and projects that were total failures. In most cases the difference between the ones I made money from and the ones I lost money on was the amount of time I was willing to put into the project.

Let’s get started;

Due to the current power of Google it’s important that you build a website and set it up so that it ranks well in Google. About the only way I know how to explain this is to you is to do it and write the steps I would take to get it done, as I do it.

I will be referring to my website designedtorank.com as I do this but will be explaining and showing you how to set up a web business in the brand management industry. When selecting a keyword, I do select words with 10,000 and up global monthly searches and I do not care about competition.

Step 1

1) The idea is to rank for the keyword brand management

2) You put the keyword in Google and do a search.

3) You look for “brand management” in bold.

4) You want to know how many exact matches there are in the top 10.

5) Then do a search for (inanchor) type in this: inanchor:”brand management”

This will show you websites that have the most anchor text using the keyword brand management.

You then compare websites that rank in the search results, with the website’s from the inanchor results and if they are the same this tells you there is going to be a lot of competition for that keyword.

The sites that show up on both pages are my real competition.

This tells me that every website that is ranking for Brand management not only has the word brand management in the content of the site but are also the same sites that have the most anchor text pointing at them.

There is a lot of competition for this keyword but that’s a good thing.

Step Two: Domain Selection

It’s time to make a decision. Do you want to build a website for the search engines and try and use an exact match domain name or do you want to use a name you have already have set aside for branding purposes?

While exact match domain names do help you rank it is by far not the most important aspect in ranking.

For example I am using designedtorank.com and I am going to rank it for brand management. While the extension does not have an effect on ranking unless it is a country specific extension I would still try to go with a .com for branding purposes.

Step Three: Build a Website

1. Set up hosting and turn the name servers to point to that host. I prefer Host Gator and the hosting company is an important step in all this. I had a Spanish hosting company block the search engines from seeing my sites one time to save on bandwidth.
2. I love WordPress and I am going to use it for the backend so let me walk you through the steps really fast to set up a WordPress CMS.
   1. You need to add Cpanel after the domain name if you are set up with a hosting company that uses Cpanel, example: designedtorank.com/cpanel.
   2. Enter the password and login you got from the hosting company and you should land on a page that looks like this. At the bottom of the page look for Fantastico De Luxe
   3. 

Click Fantastico De Luxe and you should then land on a page that looks like this.

Now look for WordPress in the left hand Column and click the link.

Now you should land on a page that looks like this and you want to click on New Installation.

Now you should be on a page that looks like this and you want to fill in all the highlighted fields with the password and user name you want to use for your login information.

Click the Install WordPress button and you should end up on a page that looks like the one below.

Click Finish installation and go to your website.

Now…you should see this when you get to your website.

Bottom right hand corner click the Log in button and you are now in the back office, just enter the password and login you used when setting up the site.

I am going to get a cup of coffee and then we will continue on to the website design and optimizing the site for the search engines.

“Ignore Google!”

Google now uses Your Web Visitors Experiences as a Ranking Factor!

As business begin to realize that Google cares more about the end users experience and less about your on and offsite SEO, companies will be forced to begin improving their web designs. They’re going to find this process cheaper, easier and faster than anything they’ve dealt with to date. Their also going to find that nothing else can improve their bottom line like Web Design Optimization can.

It’s all about the End User’s Experience!

Google’s always said, “Make pages for the user not for the search engines”.

In the past Google didn’t care what your website looked like. This was obvious from some of the websites that ranked highly in Google. With Google’s new algorithm this is no longer the case. User behavior is a ranking factor!

This means if users react in a positive way towards your website you could see a boost in traffic from Google.

Google is the only one that knows exactly how much user experience is figured into the algorithm but it makes since. Google has been saying all along focus on your website and let us focus on our algorithm.

Google Panda was built through an algorithm update that used artificial intelligence in a more sophisticated and scalable way than previously possible. Human quality testers rated thousands of websites based on measures of quality, including design, trustworthiness, speed and whether or not they would return to the website. Google’s new Panda machine-learning algorithm, made possible by and named after engineer Navneet Panda, was then used to look for similarities between websites people found to be high quality and low quality.

Many new ranking factors have been introduced to the Google algorithm as a result, while older ranking factors like PageRank have been downgraded in importance. Google Panda is updated from time to time and the algorithm is run by Google on regular basis.

It’s clear that this is the direction Google is heading and as they get closer to creating an algorithm that understands human responses to web page quality where does this leave the current group of SEO’s?

Christmas time can be hectic time of the year. It can get to the point where you want to call your good friends and say, “Hey listen! Let’s not exchange presents this year!”

We know that if they give us something we will have to return their present with one of greater value, or we’re going to feel bad.

We are automatically obligated when somebody gives us something. There’s a sense of obligation to return the favor. Sometimes we do this for love or for fun. But many times we give gifts or do favors out of a sense of obligation. If I gave you a gift or did you a favor, would you feel you owed me something in return?

Most likely you
would want to give me a gift or do me a favor in return, possibly to be nice, but mainly to get rid of the feeling of owing me something.

This is an unconscious filling, but quite strong.

Gift giving and favor swapping is what makes us human. It’s necessary for our very survival. If one person gives someone some food, shelter, money, a gift or even a favor, it will cause that person to fell indebted to the other person.

The only reason we are here now is because our ancestors shared their food and their skills an honored a network of obligations.
When we give someone a gift we trigger a feeling in them of being indebted to us. The only way to get rid of this feeling is to respond and return the gift or favor. Sometimes they will ignore these feelings, but these feelings will linger. It might even take a long time for them to act on the feeling. But the neatest thing about this is that when the gift or favor is returned it is normally of a higher value.

If someone returns a gift of lesser value it will leave them with a feeling of an unpaid debt. So, in most cases they are going to give something of higher value than the original gift.

There was some research done in 1976. They sent Christmas cards to total strangers and not only did they get a large number sending cards back to them, but these people (who were total strangers) continued to send Christmas cards many years after the experiment was over. Think about it like this; say you are in a room with another person, as a team or working separately on different task. After a while a guy comes into the room to tell you that you have a 10 min. break. The other person in the room ask, if he can leave during the break and the guy in charge says, yes.

A few minutes later this person returns with two cans of Coke. He opens one and hands the other one to you and says, I asked the guy if it was okay to bring soda in and he said yes, so I bought one for you too.

You open the soda and drink it.

The person in charge comes in the room and starts the task again. A little while later the person in charge says he needs to take care of some stuff and everyone is free to go. When he leaves, the other person turns to you and ask, if you are interested in buying some raffle tickets. The person who sells the most tickets gets a prize; you say okay and buy three raffle tickets for five dollars.

You see, they did this experiment.

If someone gave you a can of soda would you then reciprocate in buying raffle tickets if they asked you to? Half of the time Joe offers the soda. The other half he doesn’t. The results?

When Joe brings you a soda you’re twice as likely to purchase a raffle ticket as when Joe doesn’t bring you a soda. You feel that you have to buy the raffle ticket because he gave you a gift even though the raffle ticket cost a lot more than the soda.

The power of reciprocating has been well known to people who manage direct marketing campaigns.

For example, mailing unsolicited donations for a veterans group generated an average response rate of 18%. When the mailing campaign included personalized address labels, the donation almost doubled to 35%. Marketers use this method to persuade you to perform some type of action, such as making a purchase, volunteering, or funding a project.

It is difficult to say no to a gift.

Any time you give something away for free on your website it creates an opportunity to obligate the person that is receiving the gift.

Let’s say there’s an e-commerce site offering free shipping on orders over $75.

But does this offer really obligate us?

Consider the fact that we not only have to buy something; we have to spend a certain amount of money.  Perhaps more than we wanted to spend. By agreeing to spend more than we’d originally planned, we presented the first gift, our willingness to spend more money. The company then reciprocate by giving us free shipping.

This feels like an exchange, at best. So the offer of free shipping does not create a feeling of being indebted.

To in debt someone they have to feel like they got a gift with no strings attached. At Zappos.com’s online shoe store they offer free shipping with no strings attached. Even better they offer free shipping if you decide to return that item.

Now that’s cool!

This makes the offer feel like a gift, to you when you shop on their online shoe store.

Free gifts are very powerful. If the site gives you a free no strings attached gift, it will trigger you to reciprocate.

There is a coffee store inside the mall where I live and every time I go there they give my son a little bag of cookies. And in return I sit down and drink a cup of coffee. After all, the cookies are free with a cup of coffee. So by giving my son the free cookies they obligate me to buy the coffee.

By giving a gift with no strings attached, you could cause a customer or friend to become a longtime customer or friend.

One way for a website to give a gift would be giving the gift of information.

For example, this website sells website designs, and we dedicated pretty much the whole website to giving guidance and information on making money online rather it’s with your website design, search engine optimization or even social media marketing.

No, this doesn’t guarantee someone’s going to purchase from me, but it does increase my chances.

And it could be the difference between them spending money with me or with my competition. Even if they don’t purchase right away, they are likely to eventually come back and buy. It’s also a great way to get people to feel out a form.

There was a test done in 2007 were they used a website that provide useful information about different formats of media files, definitions of media files, when to use each format and so on.

In the reward condition, visitors can access the information by first completing a form that asked for their names, addresses, and other demographic information.

They tested this site against a separate site were visitors could immediately access the information and then they were asked to fill out a form.

Visitors were twice as likely to fill out the form after getting the free information then filling out the form to access the information.

You know there are a lot of things that we can do that would be like giving a gift to our website visitors.

Showing your visitors other products they might be interested in buying, could be seen as a gift.

Giving away free content could be seen as a gift.

Giving away an e-book, could be seen as a gift.

The reason we want to do this is that giving a gift triggers or increases the likelihood that others will reciprocate by giving us something in return.

Okay, I want to show you a couple of the neat little things you can do inside the WordPress Admin area that most people do not know about.

So let’s log in and play around.

First thing we need to do is go to our website home page and either click a “log in” link like the one above or if we have do not have one then we need to add wp-admin after the URL.

Like the image below.

From here we should get a page that looks like this.

Now once we log in we should get a page that looks like this.

This is the control panel that we use to add content to the site as well as add pages, images, photos, videos and control the site.

By clicking the screen options link we can pick the number of columns we want to show up on our blog. We can then drag and drop everything in the order we want it to show. This gives us control of the look and feel of the admin area.

I now need to figure out where each section is controlled from within the admin control panel. And I want to play with the logo a little with its spacing and colors as well as add a phone number to the header.

This might sound bad but if I am going to spend my time writing something I’d like to hear some kind of response from my readers. It doesn’t matter if I’m selling advertising, products or just my ideas I want to have a large readership. I know there are number ways to increase the readership on my blog but I wanted to see what I could come up with off the top of my head.

Okay one thing we want to do is increase the number of pages each reader is reading. I want to be judged on more than one post because the one they are reading might not be my best. I can do this by highlighting related post within each post I make. And then at the end of the article I’ll highlight post that may be of interest to those who like this article.

I believe WordPress has a plug-in that will help me do this. I’ll look into that as soon as I finish writing this article.

The next thing I want to do is to do a series. By doing this I stand a chance of getting readers coming back to my website to see what’s been written, as well as getting readers that find one post to click through to the older post or the newer post either way increasing my page views.

Another way to increase readership is with controversy. If you know enough about your subject and you’re a good enough writer you can get a ton of traffic, this way. This a dangerous game to play if you’re not up to par on your topic or unable to carry on a debate with someone.

And last, but definitely not least, you have to have good quality content. It’s got to be useful, original, and interesting to your target audience. The more you raise the quality of your content, the more you will see your readership and membership grow.

Having a blog is not only fun but done correctly is extremely profitable lifestyle. Regardless you want to maintain and increase a readership.