Posted by Ben Jones on April 29, 2007
I don’t want to overwhelm you guys with backlink offers but I had to introduce you to this one. I suggest everybody with a website take advantage of this. Darin.cc has a blog that reports information on Search Engine Marketing. It is a very informative site. I especially like the two articles on Pay Per Click advertising( Part1 Part2). Those are excellent articles to supplement the two articles that I wrote on the same subject (My PPC-Part1 Part2).
Darin is offering 2 links to your blog if you review his blog and he is throwing in a FREE Platinum IAWMD Membership($75 value)! He will also give you a link on BigTagCloud.Com which is growing pretty quickly. That is pretty good compensation for a short review. So be sure to check it out. The IAWMD membership alone should be well worth it.
Posted by Ben Jones on April 28, 2007
Traffic, Traffic, Traffic! Your site is absolutely ineffective without it. The discussion about how to produce traffic to a website is one of the more overly examined topics on the web. However, it is still the one subject that nobody seems to really know much about. Misinformation is extremely common in the world of SEO.
There are only a few things that we know for sure about SEO. One of the things we do know is that quality backlinks will do a lot for your search engine rankings. Emphasis must be placed on the word “quality”. Backlinks from well-known sites with subjects relative to your site’s will immediately increase your search engine ranking.
HOW TO GET A QUALITY BACKLINK
On the other hand, your site could actually be penalized for backlinks from irrelevant, worthless websites. It’s a very touchy system. With that said, one of the blogs that I frequent is offering a backlink to any site that will review it. It is a pretty popular blog (Technorati top 14,268), so a backlink from this site could be beneficial to you if your site’s topic relates to e-commerce, e-marketing, e-(you get the point)
.
This blog is full of good information which is why I keep it on my reader. It is supposedly written by a “13-year old” so the grammar is sometimes incorrect but the content is always valuable. My point is that if you need backlinks you may want to do a small review post just to get a backlink from a popular site. Visit his blog to see how even a 13-year old can make money online.
Posted by Ben Jones on April 27, 2007
OK…Maybe the picture was a little misleading
. The S.W.O.T. that we will discuss today actually refers to your businesses Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Those of you who with formal business backgrounds are probably very familiar with this term. Everybody else, don’t worry, its a piece of cake.
The SWOT Analysis is one of the most fundamental parts of your business plan. It’s one of the first things that need to be done when planning to open your business. No matter what kind of business you plan to open, it is very beneficial to do a SWOT Analysis.
IS IT REALLY NECESSARY?
If your analysis is done correctly it will usually give you an accurate assessment of your chances for success in a particular market. A lot of business owners completely skip this step because it is not a “required” section of a business plan. In any entrepreneur guide, you will find the Executive Summary, Vision, Mission, etc… as the necessary parts of the business plan but rarely do they include the SWOT analysis as a required piece.
Well, I am here to tell you that the S.W.O.T. Analysis is absolutely necessary. The SWOT analysis will usually alert you to potential problems with your business before it even starts. It may also help you to see where your niche could be tweaked a little to ensure success.
WHY IS IT SO NECESSARY?
As a lender, I wouldn’t loan you a dime until I was sure that you knew exactly what you were getting into and what your chances for success were. Remember that 50% of new businesses close within the first year. “Why”, you ask? Because they failed to properly research their market and did not know what they were getting into.
A lot of times, failure can be avoided if the proper research had been done. So before you start your business, whether its a blog, website, lawn service, daycare, etc.., be sure that you have properly analyzed your market with a SWOT Analysis. You may change your mind before you even get started.
HOW TO DO IT?
So how do you do a SWOT Analysis? Well, its extremely simple once you understand the different sections of it. The four sections are as follows:
1) Strengths
2) Weaknesses
3) Opportunities
4) Threats
They are all pretty self explanatory. For each section you will just want to consider how your business compares to others in your market in terms of product, price, location, funding, & niche.
You will also want to consider how the saturation of your market effects your business for each section of your analysis. Some things to remember:
1) SWOT analysis should be written in paragraph form
2) Illustrations are beneficial to your analysis(Graphs, etc…)
3) The “Opportunities” section should identify some ways in which your business can advance in the market
MAKE SURE THAT IT STANDS
Take your time and really put some thought into each section of your analysis. There’s nothing worse than meeting with investors who can immediately identify weaknesses of your business that you have not justified with your analysis.
After your SWOT Analysis is done, you should have a realistic picture of your chances of successfully entering that market. Don’t be afraid to show your analysis to friends and family. They may be able to identify some factors that you have overlooked. Better them than a potential stakeholder!
Lastly, analyze your data with an unbiased eye. It’s better to save your time and resources for projects that can actually work rather than wasting them one’s that you love but have no chance of being successful. If you do this, you will eventually find the project that will change your life.
If you don’t, you’ll waste all your time and money, and never get to the project that should have been your ticket. So SWOT your business and see if it can still stand. Leave your comments…
Posted by Ben Jones on April 26, 2007
When it comes to SEO, I always hear people talk about the importance of
backlinks, meta tags, and age of url. While I do believe that all of these things are important, I can’t help but recognize that all of my search engine clicks have come from words within my content.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH SEO
This leads me to believe that once your site is indexed, search engines place a lot of weight on the actual content of your site. I do not have many backlinks to my site yet, but everyday people have found me through a Google search term that matches something listed in one of my articles.
Which would mean that your site could get a lot of traffic if you strategically listed keywords in your content. I was under the impression that this would not happen until I had built this expansive network of backlinks from well-known sites. Well, it appears that this may not be necessarily true.
I’M DOING AN EXPERIMENT
I am starting to see more and more bloggers/webmasters that won’t do link exchanges but will do content exchanges. Has content become more powerful in the world of SEO? I don’t know, but I have decided to do a little experiment.
I have selected a keyword that I am not currently ranked for(entrepreneur guide) and I will attempt to climb up the rankings by listing that phrase in the title, content, and signature of every post for the next month. I will chart my results to see if my rankings have improved and how much they have improved.
After I have those results I wll consider doing an experiment using just backlinks so that I can compare the effect that each factor has on page rankings. The results of this experiment may be helpful to us all. It may tell us that focusing our energies on content is the best thing that we can do as far as optimization.
But hey, lets just see, shall we? Check back often, I will be charting my results weekly.
Keyword: entrepreneur guide
Posted by Ben Jones on April 25, 2007
There’s nothing worse than waking up everyday and dragging yourself to a job that you hate….. EXCEPT…waking up everyday and dragging yourself to your own business that you hate.
WHERE’S THE LOVE?
I always tell people that one of the keys to owning a successful business is to love that business. If you love your business you will treat it like your baby. You will do whatever is necessary to ensure that it will grow to maturity.
Even if that means shouldering an extra workload or suffering with it through down times. You will never turn your back on that business because you love and believe in it.
IF YOU DON’T
But if you don’t love it, every single setback brings you closer to quitting. Your days are longer and harder. And every other business opportunity you see will look like a better one than you currently have. Your business was actually doomed from the beginning.
This lack of love is the reason that a lot of businesses close in their early years. Its also the reason that majority of entrepreneurs are nomads who jump from opportunity to opportunity without ever really developing any of them.(This has been all of us at one point or another)
GOOD ADVICE FOR YOU
If this is you, I suggest that you find a business field that you love, look for the opportunities in it and build a business that you can be proud of.
Take it from me, a brilliant business idea is worthless if not fueled by passion, dedication, and persistence. So tell me…. whats fueling your business?
Posted by Ben Jones on April 24, 2007
Export trade is one of the most lucrative business models on the web. I’m always shocked to find the number of Internet guru’s who overlook this method. I know that a lot of people are actually scared off by the high scam and fraud levels but the actual compensation for successfully brokering a trade is usually 10 times anything you could make blogging, marketing, etc…
It’s more than worth the extra work you will have to do to ensure legitimacy of customers. The best part about it is that you do not actually have to have possession of the product. The best way to actually do it is to serve as a trade agent and collect a commission.
WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO?
All you have to do is see what foreign buyers want and find a manufacturer who will sell the products at good prices. You oversee the trade and collect your commission. You can do all this via email. People are trading everything from auto parts to paper products.
The kicker is that when foreign buyers are importing, they usually want 30,000 t-shirts instead of the low quantities you would sell to a retail customer. Can you see where the increase in profit comes in? I suggest that anyone spending time on the web look into this opportunity.
A WORD OF CAUTION
Remember that the risk of fraud is extremely high so you have to do your homework and know who you are dealing with. I would stay away from public websites like Alibaba. I only consider trade leads from U.S. gov’t owned websites like http://www.export.gov/. The buyers are pre-screened before they ever make it onto this site. This gives you some security. A few more tips are listed below.
EXPORT TRADE TIPS:
1) Visit http://www.wbe.net/ (Export Trade Course)
2) Familiarize yourself with “Incoterms” (Standard Trade terms)
3) Don’t be afraid to verify information given with U.S. Embassy
4) Don’t release goods until payment has fully cleared into your bank
I’m not saying export trade is for everyone, I’m just saying it’s an option that I have been toying with for some time now and know it to be very lucrative. Definitely something else worth adding to your repertoire.
I have bid on a couple contracts now that I did not get. Let’s just say had I completed them I would have moved up into another tax bracket. Now that I have a good idea of how everything works, it’s only a matter of time. Leave Your Comments…
Posted by Ben Jones on April 23, 2007
Ok..I’ve been out of town for a few days but now I’m back and eager to get back to blogging. So, I will continue with the Pay Per Click tips.
TODAY’S TIP: TURN OFF “CONTENT MATCHING” FEATURE.
WHAT IS CONTENT MATCHING?
I found this trick to be very helpful with my pay per click campaigns. Google’s content matching feature will display your ad for searches that Google deems are “relevant” to your site.
The problem is that Google will have a much broader idea of what is relevant because they exist to make money. So your ads end up being displayed for searches that have nothing to do with your site. As a result, your CTR (Click Through Rate) and conversion rates will suffer. (High CTR’s are essential to getting better rankings in search results)
Who wants to pay for clicks that they have no chance of converting?….No one! Your conversion and Click Through Rates should increase once you turn this feature off. Then your ad will only be shown when someone searches for your keywords.
HOW TO TURN IT OFF
So log into your Google Adwords account, put a check next to your campaigns and click the “Edit Settings” button. Once your inside the “Edit Campaigns” screen, you will scroll to the right and uncheck the box next to “Content Network”. Save your settings and watch your ad campaigns soar!
Posted by Ben Jones on April 18, 2007
The Internet is one the more efficient ways to advertise your business. You will be hard pressed to find any viable company today that does not have a website. However, in order to fully access the power of the Internet, your website must be properly advertised. One of the best ways to see an immediate increase in traffic is through Pay Per Click advertising with search engines such as Google.
What is Pay Per Click?
Pay Per Click advertising gets your ads listed in search results for your selected keywords. Therefore, your ad only appears when someone is looking for your product/service and you will only be charged when someone actually clicks your ad.
The tough part about search engine marketing is getting your ads to the top of searches with as low of cost as possible. This can be very tricky. The formula that search engines use to decide where ads place in results vary from search engine to search engine. Nonetheless, most fundamental advertising techniques will usually help to ensure that you get the most visitors for your money regardless of search engine.
The Method
The technique we will discuss today is fairly simple and will save you tons of money. The purpose of this technique is to avoid the expensive price of the more popular, broader keywords. So what you want to do is find a bunch of slightly less popular keywords that will cost you less per click.
One way that we can do this is to utilize the names of industry competitors as keywords and allow your ads to be seen when someone searches for that company. This method works very well because you are stealing customers from your competitors and you will be paying a lot less money per click because the companies name will not be as popular as a traditional keyword.
Example:
I own an bookstore in North Carolina and want to use Google Adwords to advertise my website. Instead of paying ($1.50 per click) for keywords like “bookstore, books, etc…” that get 400,000 searches per month, I would bid($0.25 per click) on keywords like “Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc…” that get 20,000 searches per month.
As a reult, I place much higher in the search engine results page (SERP) because of less competition for the keyword and will ultimately save tons of money while seeing more traffic. Makes perfect sense to me… More AdWords tips to come.
Posted by Ben Jones on April 17, 2007
Well, this article is going to be terribly off subject but I feel that I am more than justified in writing about the tragedy that took place yesterday on the campus of Virginia Tech University. I am always deeply saddened to hear about such occurrences.
These types of events remind us of the terrible state our world is actually in. As a Christian, I can’t help but notice the spiritual implications of these events. And the frequency with which these events now occur is absolutely disturbing.
It is just not human nature to kill. Therefore, killing mass amounts of people would take some influence that obviously does not come from God. We are a nation that needs prayer like never before. We must return to the principles that made our nation great in the first place or calamity will continue to engulf us.
I encourage everyone to pray for the families of the victims as well as the shooter. I also encourage you to examine yourselves and be sure that your contribution to society(you have one whether you know it or not) is one of love, peace, and respect. Be blessed…
Click the link below to read about this tragic incident:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/17/vtech.shooting/index.html
Posted by Ben Jones on April 16, 2007
Reaching millionaire status used to seem like an incomparable task reserved only for the intellectually gifted or the insanely lucky. However, these days obtaining a million is becoming less and less of a feat. I was shocked by the number of millionaire’s that actually exist in the U.S. today.
It is estimated that over 2,770 new millionaire’s are created per day(in the U.S. alone!). How insane is that? That number was almost impossible to believe until I found several sources that reported about the same estimate.
It is also reported that the ways in which these people achieve millinaire status varies greatly. There is no direct connection between millionaire’s and a particluar industry. What does this mean to us?…. Well, actually quite a bit.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO US?
Firstly, the fact that so many people become milionaire’s everyday let’s us know that the feat is attainable. The question, however, is “what is stopping you from doing it?” Well, throughout my research of entrepreneurship, I have found one constant attribute among millionaire’s that seperates them from everybody else.
It is their willingness to do what others won’t do. Consider this: Investing, for example, is one of the more popular forms of gaining wealth. However, only the investors who take risks on “ground floor” opportunities reap the major benefits.
Millionaire’s are usually the people who either see an opportunity before it is a sure thing and take a risk on it or who labor tirelessly in pursuit of their goals. Which one are you?
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
If I was to pose the question, “What would you do for a million dollars?”, I would receive some rather outrageous responses. A lot of people would wrestle sharks for a million dollars but won’t stay up late to make that extra call, finish that last report, or complete that extra research. They also won’t risk $1,000 in order to make a $1,000,000. Hence, the reason they won’t be a part of tomorrow’s “2,770″. But what about you?
Close your eyes and think of what a million dollars would do for you and your family. Then think of the craziest thing you would do for a million…..Guess what? You don’t even have to do what you were thinking(thank God!). All you have to do is everything that you know you’re not doing right now.
Numbers…Don’t…Lie(2,770 new millionaire’s per day!).Your million is waiting on you. You just have to decide what you are willing to do for it. Leave your Comments…
