Okay, I made a mess out of the whole $30,000.00 in 30 days, so I stopped posting here to try and straighten it out.

One of the first problems I ran into was that even though you don’t have to go to school to become a social media marketer, most people have no idea how to use the social media sites for marketing. This means either a lot of training or a lot of outsourcing.  We decided to go with outsourcing and started getting sloppy work right off the bat.

I knew right off that this was not what I was looking for.

I want something that can grow, make me lots of money, but not take up all my time.

So I am now back to where I started; finding the right niche.

Even though we had a niche that would work in sales, the business was unable to grow, because we didn’t have the manpower to handle the volume of orders.

So this means going back to the original idea and seeing if we can come up with something that doesn’t tie our time to our money.

Making money has never been a nicely paved road with white picket fences and flowers growing in a straight line while the children swing in their tires, at least not for me. It’s been a dark deserted unpaved road with potholes that force me to change directions.

But I guess if it was easy everyone would be doing it!

You see, with every decision we make there is a price to be paid.

We have to be willing to take risk and make sacrifices. When we start hitting potholes, and want to turnaround, to be successful we have to continue on. Even if it means fine tuning and tweaking our game plan as we go along.

Unlike everything else in our lives, the roadmap to wealth can’t be outsourced.

The idea is to work long hours and really hard in the beginning but to be able to continue to make the money but spend less time on the company as the project goes alone.

And there’s no way I can do that if I’m spending all my time training employees and trying to figure how to get the jobs done correctly and efficiently. Building wealth is a formula and not an ingredient. It’s a process that makes and creates millionaires. Events are byproducts of process. If you are looking for wealth then you have to look for the process.

Processes cannot be outsourced, because processes come from wisdom, personal growth, strength and ambience.

So here’s what I want to do;

I want to start by going by to the drawing board and look out how the work is being done and figure out a way to outsource the jobs efficiently.

The Thing about Outsourcing

Outsourcing gets talked about a lot these days and the reason I like outsourcing is because without outsourcing, I would be forced to hire new employees every time a new need came up.

Hiring new employees mean more computers, chairs, desks, phones, insurance, taxes, internet, power, training and the list goes on and on.

But then outsourcing is also a valuable tool for anyone looking to start his or her own

Business. When just getting started you can start outsource jobs from other companies, and only take on the jobs that fit your schedule and expertise.

What is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is sending a project to a third party vendor or service provider to get the project done.

Outsourcing really started catching on in the 1990’s.

It’s a way to lower your cost but still get the work done. A company just starting out isn’t large enough to handle all the demands that are required of them. The idea is to outsource projects to experts in the field, so that we don’t have to hire on new employees, buy computers, chairs, insurance, training and everything else that goes along with hiring new employees.

On the other side of the coin we have outsources.

There are lots of people who are experts in their field and offer  their service to companies all over the world. This has allowed thousands of people to start their own business by becoming a company that specializes in certain outsourcing projects.

Outsourcing offers many advantages to companies that are looking for expertise in a certain field, as well as to people who are looking to use their knowledge to make a living as a contractor.

Benefits of Outsourcing

1. The ability to gain the knowledge and expertise from an industry professional. You are able to find a company that fits that particular project.
Being able to pick and choose the company you want to work with will ensures quality result in the end.

2. You know exactly what that project is going to cost you.

3. You save money on hiring a new employee for payroll, as well as the benefits.

4. Outsourcing frees up resources allowing for more concentration on the more important aspects of the business.

5. Outsourcing offers flexibility, because you don’t hire employees directly. It allows you to always have a provider on call without having to pay if there is no work to do.

6. You save money because you don’t have to hire someone every time a new project pops up.

As an Outsourcer;

1. You only have to take on projects that suit your needs. Take projects that excite you and you enjoy doing.

2. You are able to take on projects that fit your time line.

3. There is a lot of money to be made as an independent contractor.

4. You can start your own company by taking on outsourced jobs. This allows you to get your business set up and looking professional before you start taking on your own clients.

There is a lot of controversy over buying backlinks. Google for one really frowns on the practice because it makes their ranking system hard to administrate. Google even put the word out of they would be punishing people who buy links, but the fact is it’s really difficult to tell which links are natural and which are bought.

The truth of the matter is that Google is not the only search engine out there and a lot of webmasters are not trying to optimize their site for the search engines as much as they’re trying to make money with their websites. Quality back links can translate into money, a higher page rank, and more visitors; backlinks can generate traffic. If your purpose is to bring traffic, many of the sites that dropped after Google shifted its algorithm did not report a loss in traffic. So it is debatable whether it really hurts you to buy links or not.

It would also appear that buying links to be listed in a directory is not weighted as poorly as buying links from major site who id selling them. After all, you do want to be listed in the major directories under the relevant category.

So by buying backlinks you are able to add them quickly, it’s less time-consuming, you can build PageRank effectively, and it drives traffic to your website.

Of course there are an equal number of bad things that could happen, for example your website could get banned, de-indexed , links cost money, and there’s no guarantees of getting results.

At the end of the day it comes down to a personal decision whether you choose to buy links or not. Despite Google’s obvious dislike for the practice, many webmasters do use paid links as part of their marketing strategy.

Of course there’s also the budget, how much money do you have to spend on links? You need to include the timeframe in your budget estimates.

You want backlinks that are very visible on the page. Putting it near the top, highlighting it in some way, or paying for a featured link.

Your link also needs to be relevant to the content on your site.

You want to pay to get into a good neighborhood…. the page rank of the referrals will tell the story.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don‘t talk about backlinks to someone. Most people who are not involved with a website don’t even know what a backlink is.

Basically a back link is when a website links from their website to your website with a link that takes a surfer directly to your website. It’s pretty simple to see how backlinks can equal more traffic and more business.

However, this isn’t the only reason to get back links.

A backlink is a type of referral that Google uses to measure your website’s reputation. Google catalogs the number of backlinks and the strength of those backlinks to determine how well your website should rank for the different keywords.

Other words, by getting backlinks you’re getting traffic from other websites as well as raising your visibility in the major search engines like Google.

Back links are important!

And while we are talking about how important backlinks are let’s not forget that they are also used to determine how much are website is worth when you’re getting ready to sell it.

However, not all backlinks are the same.

When it comes to the Internet nothing is as straightforward as it seems. You see most tech wizards and geek geniuses have ended up working for one of the major search engines. This means that even though a standard HTML URL is easy enough to understand, search engine optimization is a totally different game. To make it even more difficult it’s a very secretive game.

Google and the other search engines know that if anyone understood their exact formula they could rank any site for any keyword.

So, while you can learn a lot about how to code and get backlinks, you will never totally understand what each backlink is worth.

Back links have always been a dominant factor when trying to rank for a competitive keyword. However, in the past the algorithms were not designed to take into account people trying to game the system.

Google was one of the first major search engines to start looking at how to reward quality links that were relevant to the content and added something to the site instead of rewarding links that were gaming the system.

Google can now determine quality links while penalizing non-quality links.

Links are no longer counted just for their coding, but the environment around the link is also counted. The environment includes page rank of the site that is linking to you as well as the content on the page and the back links that page has.

Page Rank ranges from 1 to 10, the higher the number the stronger the  link.

This number is nothing more than a measurement of the sites reputation according to the search engine’s algorithm. What you want is a backlink from a site that not only has a higher Page Rank than you do but also has something to do with the content of your site. If your site is about cars you want to be included in a site that reviews car web sites. If you get backlinks from someone who is selling Bibles, it’s likely to be ignored is a good quality backlink.

A link that shows up near the top of the referring page is worth more than one at the bottom.

Of course something else that a lot of people overlook is the anchor text. If you have a site that sells wristbands and the anchor text says pretty wristbands then it won’t be as effect as one that clearly describes your wristbands like quality silicone wristbands.

You need quality anchor text.

In the past people would join link exchange sites to get reciprocal links. But now the search engines actually discount reciprocal links in favor of one way inbound links. This makes it a lot harder to get links because you are no longer able to trade a link for a link.

Here’s how the search engines think.

If I meet someone on the street and they tell me where they live I can get an idea about the person by the neighborhood they live in. I can tell a lot about that person from their neighbors.

The search engines work about the same way, spiders crawl sites that link to you and get an idea about you from what they are saying. If these are quality websites, who are in the same niche as you, and are linking to your site, then it’s a highly relevant and important link.

Immediately we know it’s about quality not quantity.

It’s not how many neighbors you have but the type of neighbors you have. It’s the reason a lot of people get confused about PageRank because it’s not based on the number of links but rather the quality of those links. This is why often times a site with fewer backlinks will outrank a larger site that has more backlinks just by getting the right type of links.

And this makes our job as SEO’s a lot easier. While search engines are programmed people are not. It only takes a couple minutes for a person to form an opinion or get an idea about you and your business. Directing people to your site from link farms and other like-minded sites will hurt your reputation a lot more than any benefits you’ll ever get from them.

And if you’re wondering what an SEO is, there is actually a whole culture built around Google and their search engine policies. Some practices are labeled “Black Hat” for evil marketing practices and other’s white hat practices because these are more natural.

But at the end of the day many gray areas appear on both sides as they are basically things that are commercially motivated but are really hard for search engine to spot.

Now, Google’s focus is keeping themselves in business and if it means destroying you and your business to do so you shouldn’t blame them, however your main goal should be keeping yourself in business and you should look at all your options and decide what’s going to work best for you and not necessarily was going to work best for search engines. Who really even knows rather Google will be here tomorrow?

So your focus should be keeping yourself in business and making sure you don’t trip any of the wires that are keeping others in business.

Of course we can’t control everything and some people will decide not to make a purchase for reasons that have nothing to do with our website. There are things that happen before people ever get to our site that we have little to no control. Although some of those things we do have control over.

Things That We Have Control Over

People that visit our websites are more likely to make a purchase if they have heard of our company and products elsewhere. It’s the reason companies spend millions of dollars when building brand awareness.

Now if your product and service is identical to your competition then it’s going to mainly be about price. It’s one of the reasons I look for niches with-in a main niche. There are also seasonable products that will have higher conversion rates at different times of the year.

Other things that effects conversion that we can control are;

• Price
• Warranty
• In-Stock
• Shipping Speed
• Positive Reviews
• Financing
• Payment Terms
• Payment Methods

Things That We Have No Control Over

We have no control over the websites visitor’s level of commitment to the purchase. Everyone that visits your site will not have the same commitment to act.

We also have no control over the environment the person is in. Someone sitting in a room full of friends in the middle of the day buying a present for a friend, would react differently than if they were sitting at home by themselves making the same purchase.

Yes, the time of day, day of the week, personality, physical environment and much more affect the users buying decision before they ever get to the landing page. And those are things I will touch on briefly but what I want to focus on more is how to get someone that is ready to buy to buy from us, instead of the competition.

You see there are some people who are happy with what they’ve got and getting these people to buy is a lot harder than getting someone to buy who is not happy with their current state of life.

If someone is unhappy with their current state then we can use fear, greed, guilt, anger, exclusivity, flattery and salvation to help motivate them to make a purchase.

These are all things that rooted in our emotional nature.

When developing a landing page we have to keep in mind that a change in one area will have an effect in a totally different area.

Some Areas to Keep In Mind during the Development of Your Website

Trust: Your website has to create a feeling of trust. I make purchases daily online and I can tell you I get a little nervous every time I do it. I am giving you all my personal information from my contact information to my credit card information.

By telling your website visitors your intentions it will help ease some of the pain.

• Will I get Spam?
• Will you steal my credit card information?
• Will my purchase arrive damaged?
• Are there any fine print charges?
• Will it arrive on time?
• Will I get what I ordered?
• Will you respond to me if there is a problem?
• If I am not happy can I get a refund?

These are all questions going through my mind as I make the purchase and you can ease my mind by having a trust building website design.

Having privacy policies, detailed shipping directions, return policies, testimonials, certifications, and other things that make me believe that I am doing business with someone of integrity, will help ease the pain.

Confusion: If you want me to buy something from you then you need to make it as simple and as least confusing as possible. I don’t won’t to have to think, if you make me think then the chances of my not making the purchase has increased my 95%.

Make the website simple and easy to use and don’t ask me for information that is not absolutely necessary for me to make the purchase.

Do not over load me with too many choices and links to click on.

And make the links that I do click on extremely clear and easy to understand. When I click purchase, is that going to add the item to my shopping cart or take me to the checkout page?

I don’t want any surprises, don’t add shipping in at the end or make a link that I think is taking me to the checkout page actually take me to a page with more product information.

And worst off all don’t make me reenter all my information because of an error on the page.

When I get to the checkout page let me proceed all the way through the process with no interruptions.

Fixing usability problems in this area can have major effects on your conversion.

Make Me Feel Wanted: You’ve made me trust you and I feel safe but now I want to feel wanted. It’s part of human nature. We want to be recognized, understood and valued.

Make me feel like a wanted part of your group.

We’ve been grouped together our whole lives from the car we drive, to the school we graduated from, to the place we work and the team we are a fan of. Your website should create a desire in me that makes me want to be part of your group, while at the same time making me feel like you want me to be part of your group.

Quicksand: Your website needs to grab hold of me and not let go. Once someone becomes aware of your business you want to build on that relationship.

The idea is to turn strangers into friends and friends into customers. The consumers are in control and they have learned to ignore just about every kind of marketing gimmick you can through at them. They only care about what’s in it for them and they give very little permission and time to interact.

By building a relationship and helping them meet their goals we are allowed more time and permission. A relationship program should be started on the very first contact.

Loyalty: “Frequent-flyer miles”, is a program that is used to help build loyalty. You need some type of plan in place to help build loyalty, this alone can have a big increase in the amount of business you do.

You are basically increasing the value of doing future business with your company.

But keep in mind that with more interactions with your business there are more chances of your customer having a negative experience, and one negative experience blows all the hard work away.

So it’s critical to make sure that all your gears are well greased and ready to go, because you don’t want a girl in billing blowing all your hard work because of a problem with a credit card.

Perfect Conversion: There is no such thing!

There are people that land on your website that are doing nothing more than looking for information, prices, the competition, or for something that they might one day hope to own.

Chances are these people will never buy from you, even more so if it’s the competition. What we are trying to do is increase the people that are going to buy from you and the people that might one day buy from you.

Fact is that there are some people that will land on your website that have no intentions of taking action at this moment. And there is nothing you can do to change that. As a matter of fact this will be the intentions of most the people that land on your site.

But on the good side there is also that group of people that will buy from you no matter what. It’s been tested and proven that no matter how difficult, clumsy or complicated a website is there is a small group of people that will always buy from them. They are willing to put up with a complicated hard to use websites because of outside influences, they can’t find another company; they are tired of looking and a verity of other reasons.

My point being we can ignore the people that will never buy from us and the people that are going to buy from us no matter what.

Our focus is on the people that might buy from us.

We have a group of people that are undecided but really close to making up their minds and a couple tweaks here and there on the landing page will get these folks.

But there are others that will need quite a bit more tweaking and still others that will need testing and tweaking to pick up.

The way the Internet works is companies spend a ton of money and resources on getting traffic to a website.

They buy media, track PPC campaigns, use SEO, SMM, custom web analytic programs, well-crafted keyword list, sales writers to write ad copy and have a staff to handle and manage keyword bidding.

While others tweak and fine tune the backend so that once someone converts they get emails that are all set up and ready to go into motion.

They’ve tested the headlines, offers and every single word in the email.

Yet they’ve totally neglected the website.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not talking about redesigning your website or giving it a new facelift. You just presume those things are going to work, I am talking about testing fine tuning and figuring out what is really going to work.

Businesses are willing to spend an obscene amount of money to buy traffic, yet the amount they are willing to spend on a landing page would be laughable if it wasn’t just down right insulting.

At best they are willing to devote a little time to the graphic designer and copy writer. And then it’s the higher ups that approve or send changes for the website. All of whom know about as much about a landing page and the way it’s set up as a new born baby knows about mixing a bottle.

And to make it worst that’s it, the design and layout go live with no testing or anything else. We don’t even look for ways to improve it.

Business will go crazy tweaking and fine tuning every other part of the business but totally ignore the center of it. Businesses lose millions a year in missed opportunities by not taking total control of the one thing that could be the biggest money maker in their business.

Online Shopping Experiences

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t have to spend money on one thing or another, having to keep up with private school, employees, computers, clients and the list goes on and on.

We’ve either just broke something, the school needs something and of course we can’t live without this something. I spend a lot of time online making purchases. And it doesn’t take long to notice a pattern in the types of websites you buy from and the types of websites you don’t buy from.

Yes, there is a reason that we do or do not buy from a website. In most cases it has nothing to do with the price, and it all happens without us even noticing it.

We go online we know what we want to buy and about how much we want to spend, we are just looking for who we want to buy from.

Things that turn us off are cluttered and confusing sites, colors that make no sense, banners all over the place and an unprofessional look and feel.

So what is it that makes us chose to buy from one website over another? 

Let’s pretend that you have just decided to launch your own website and want to give “making a living online” a try.

You’ve worked for months setting up and optimizing your campaigns.

You’ve been working 15 hour days and have constructed keyword lists, done PPC, SEO, SMM, bought banners on related websites, created an affiliate program, created a list and have set up the website analytics.

Yet only a small percent of website visitors take the action that you want them to take.

And now you are wondering what’s wrong?

It’s really a bad feeling, you are getting the traffic to the site but very little is converting to sales. You know there must be a problem but you are not seeing it.

I know how hopeless that feeling can be, and it’s the reason I am writing this now.

Everything you’ve done up until this point, all the money you’ve spent, all the profiles you’ve created, all the hard work you’ve done, every article you’ve written, comes down to a couple precious seconds.

And in those couple seconds you can truthful and accurate represent yourself any way you want.

No one is forcing you to use a certain colors, layouts, pictures, sales copy, call-to-action, or headlines that make up your landing page.

When designing a landing page you are like an artist in front of a blank canvas. The choices you are about to make can move people to action or bore them into leaving within seconds of entering the website.

The feeling is both exciting and scary; don’t believe me, build a landing page and spend a thousand bucks sending people to it and watch your stats to see how many convert so you’ll know rather or not you did a good job.

When you’ve got a landing page that is making you money, every change you make creates an adrenalin rush. You never know if you’ve just made things worse and are now losing money or rather you did something correctly and there is now an increase in sales.

Every day thousands of experts enter our website and they are the ones that determine rather we’ve got it right or not.

Never for one second believe that you are the expert!

I want to show you how to stop ignoring those folks and start listing to them. If for no other reason, the promise of better performing landing pages should be enough.

Think of landing page optimization as being like a giant online laboratory where our subjects are voluntarily participating in our experiments.

You may think I am crazy but think about the number of test subjects you are able to get on a website daily. You can test paid traffic against free traffic, Google against Yahoo and the list just keeps on going.

Statistics allow us to determine the best landing page design for that website as well as the website visitors.

When building a website this way you know you’ve just built a winner, because it is not build on opinion or a company poll, but rather on Web analytics software that has recorded every website visitor along with another large amount of detailed information.

We know on what page a visitor enters our site and on what page they leave. We know how long they looked at each item and rather or not they purchased something before leaving.

A website allows for an amount of data collection that is unheard of in any other marketing platform online or offline.

A Website also allows you to use that data to offer different content and products to different website visitors, or even visitors that have come from different sources.

It’s all about the Landing Page. A Landing Page is the page the website visitor lands on when he or she enters your site. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mini site, stand-alone site, or a page deep inside your main site, a landing page is the page someone lands on when they enter your site.

A conversion happens when a visitor lands on your website and does the action that the page was designed to get them to do. That can be anything from feeling out a form to clicking to another page, the only thing that matters is rather or not the page did what it was designed to do and that there was a measurable value for your business. But you have to keep in mind that conversion rates vary from industry to industry and from website to website.