Home Based Business Success

Steps to Starting an Internet Business # 7 – Analyze

One of the keys in any business is to determine where your business is coming from, how you can be more effective at marketing to this group of consumers, and what other markets you can tap in order to grow your business. In order to do these things, you'll need to do the next step in the plan; analyze the results of your marketing. There are several key metrics used by most Internet marketers for analytical purposes.

Unique Visitors –
The number of unique visitors to your web site. Not to be confused with hits or page views.

Page Views –
The number of times a page was accessed (not the same thing as 'hits', which is the number of times files were accessed. A single web page can be made up of dozens of different files)

Referral -
The last page looked at by a visitor before they came to your site. Now we're getting somewhere. This is the kind of information you need to go over with a fine toothed comb in order to maximize your marketing efforts. Are there new traffic sources that you were unaware of? Are your current marketing efforts bearing any fruit?

Conversion Rate -
Conversion is the percentage of visitors to one of your websites or web pages that took the desired action. That can be buying something, signing up for your news letter, filling out a lead form, or any other thing that you want them to do. If you'd like them to stand on their head in front of the mirror, and you have such a great sales page that they actually do it, count that as a conversion. The conversion for your site(s) and every sales page, product, or offer within it will be different. In addition, the conversion rate will be usually be different depending on the traffic source. The more information you have regarding the conversion rate for every page, offer, and product on your site, the better you can calculate CPM.

CPM - Cost per 1,000 visitors.
Obviously this is one of the most important metrics when you're analyzing your traffic. If you know the amount of revenue generated by a visitor to your site, you'll know how much you can pay to acquire a new one and still generate a profit. The thing to be aware of is that traffic from different sources will usually generate different CPM figures.

For example, traffic to your sales page from your forum may generate more or less revenue than traffic from PPC advertising, article marketing, or blog posts. This is because different traffic will have different conversion figures and different acquisition costs. The more granularity you can get when determining your CPM, the better, so make sure you know not only where your traffic is coming from.

Location - Where is your traffic coming from?
This is very important, and more important with some types of sites than others. If you have a geographically oriented site such as a local real estate information website, is most of your traffic coming from the area that you're targeting? If not you may have a large number of visitors but relatively few conversions. That can lead you in one of two directions; you can refine your marketing to bring more traffic from the area that you're trying to target, or you can change the scope of your offerings to more effectively convert the traffic you're getting.

Browser / resolution - While this may seem techy and unimportant to many marketers, it's actually very important. You need to be sure that your site is properly displaying in all the browsers that your visitors use, and especially the more popular ones. The same is true with screen resolution. You want your page to be optimized for the more popular resolutions used by your visitors. If you originally made your page to appeal to visitors running 800 x 600 monitors, you're probably losing sales to those running 1,440 x 900, or 1280 x 1024 monitors because some of site's features just won't be displayed correctly. Going forward, keep in mind that most of the new monitors are wide screen in either 1280 x 800, 1440 x 900, 1680 x 1050, or 1920 x 1200 resolutions. Make sure your site displays well in these resolutions so it's ready for the future.

Duration - How long are visitors staying on your site? If you have a site with a 4-page sales letter and the average duration is 30 seconds, the reason your site isn't converting well is that no one's reading your sales letter. You better hire a copywriter and revise the thing, because it's most likely crap. It's the same with any type of site. You can tell an awful lot about how well your site is holding a visitor's interest by how long they stick around.

Average Views - This also called depth, and it's the number of pages a visitor to your site views, or how deep into your site they go, when they are there. If you have a 1 page sales letter site, well, that number is always going to be 1, but it lets you know if visitors are just hitting the page they entered on, then clicking away, or are they seeing more of your content.

There are more analytics, which I'll get to in a future post, but the upshot is that you absolutely need to know as much information about your visitors and customers as possible in order to maximize your marketing effectiveness. There are many packages you can use but I like Sitemeter and Google analytics, both of which are free or have free versions that are very good. Other well regarded analytics used by marketers include Quantcast, Weblog Expert, and Compete. Most web hosting companies also have analytics of some sort you can use. Whichever package you choose, make sure you analyze, so you maximize your site's profits and minimize your efforts.

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Here are the next steps you’ll need to take on your journey toward Internet business success.

Steps to Starting an Internet Business # 5 – In the previous step you found a niche to market to. In this step you’ll determine exactly what you’ll be marketing to your (if you did your research right) hungry niche. You have a few choices. You can either:

A - Find products you can market as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing for those of you that are just looking into the whole Internet business thing, is when a company will pay you money when someone takes a specific action based upon your referral. They can buy a company’s product or sign up for their service by going through a link in your ad or from your website. You can also generate affiliate revenue by referring qualified leads to a company. How you make affiliate revenue is determined by what the company that pays you is looking for; sales or leads.

B -Develop your own product. For most people in the beginning that means writing software, a script, or an e-book that you can sell via download. As you progress you can also create info products that also incorporate physical media, such as books, pamphlets, CDs, or DVDs. In most cases you’ll be rewarded for the extra effort and expense it takes to create, package and distribute the physical products by being able to command much higher prices for them. The hard costs are not that high, so you will make much higher profits. Be advised that if you create crap, you will quickly get a (well deserved) reputation for creating crap and your customer list will dry up.

C - A 3^rd option to profit from your niche is selling products that are drop shipped. If your research indicates that products in your niche are able to be sold for a nice profit, you may want to fid what’s known as a drop shipper. A drop shipper will take an order from you and ship the product directly to your customer. Many drop shippers will even include a packing list from your company, complete with your logo and address, so as far as your customer’s concerned, their order came from you. The obvious benefit is that you’ll not need to stock or fulfill any product. Keep in mind that you will still need to handle returns.
 
One way you can mitigate that risk is to choose products that are unlikely to break and come in few varieties. This will minimize the chance that a customer gets the wrong item. Items such as consumer electronics definitely break or cause customer confusion. I was in a warehouse a few years back and one of my vendors had taken back pallets of TiVOs because the customers either couldn’t hook them up correctly or weren’t properly informed that the device required a monthly service fee. Trust me, you don’t want to be in this position, it gets expensive in a hurry.

D - A 4^th way you can market to your niche is to just create your website, make it full of good, quality content, and put Adsense or some other contextual ads on it. When people click on these ads you’ll be paid a small amount. Typically this is used as more of an icing on the cake than primary revenue stream, though. You’ll have to generate substantial traffic in the right niche before you can make very much money from this business model. If you are getting that much traffic, you can usually more effectively monetize it through other means, such as affiliate marketing or selling visitors you own product(s).
 

No matter what you determine will be your marketing method of choice for your online business, or if you do as many marketers do and sue a combination of methods, you’ll eventually have to move on to:

Steps to Starting an Internet Business # 6 - Driving traffic
This is obviously a supremely important step, because nothing else matters if no one shows up. You’ve got 2 main choices, pay for your traffic or get it free. Most marketers try to excel in both choices.

Getting traffic free is a combination of getting good search engine results and getting linked to by other sites, e-zines and blogs. The links to your site, known as backlinks, are doubly important because not only do the links drive traffic to your site, but they are one of the most important factors used by search engines (especially Google) when ranking your pages. You can get links through a number of strategies including article marketing, asking, joint ventures (JVs) with other marketers, guest posting on other blogs, blog carnivals, commenting on blogs, forum post signature links (these are “nofollow”ed so they give you traffic, but are not used in calculating your search engine rankings), and of course ‘Web 2.0’. The web 2.0 methods are using social sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Digg, del.icious, propeller, Mixx, Yahoo answers, StumbleUpon, reddit, and flikr.

I’m sure I missed some, but you get the point. These are extremely effective at getting you brand exposure and driving traffic. In some niches, the traffic from site as Stumble Upon and Digg doesn’t convert as well into sales as with other sources of traffic, but in some cases there’s so much of it, it doesn’t matter.

The other way of getting free traffic is to get good results in the search engines when people search for words or terms relevant to what you’re selling or offering. As I mentioned you’ll need links in to your site to help get good rankings. The more authoritative the site the link comes from and the farther up the page the link is placed (all else being equal) the more it is worth in terms of search engine ranking. You also want to carefully optimize your keywords and their use throughout your web pages and blog posts, especially the titles, title tags, meta tags and page / post content. I’ve done several posts on getting targeted traffic.

Your other traffic generation strategy is to pay for your traffic. You can do this in several ways, but the most common are to use pay per click advertising (PPC) such as Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) or Google Adwords, or to pay for your links to be placed on sites that would drive the kind of targeted traffic you’re looking for. You can use either paid text links or banner ads.

A few years ago paid text links were all the rage because of their positive effect on search engine rankings in addition to the traffic they generated, but they don’t seem to be as popular for this purpose now, as the search engines seem to have revised their algorithms. In any case, paid text links are definitely not my area of expertise.

If you choose to do PPC advertising I strongly advise you to learn as much as possible about what you’re doing because while this can be one of the most powerful wealth generating strategies on the Internet, and you can turn it on and off at will, you can also lose more money that you can possibly imagine, in record time, if you’re not careful. Get some good books on the subject, such as Perry Marshal’s Google Adwords, and definitely go to the AdWordsExcellence site.

One of the most important changes to have come down the pike with regard to Adwords in recent years is that Google looks at the quality of your landing page. It need to give a good user experience and relate exactly to the keyword in your ad otherwise your quality score will suffer, and your cost per click will go through the roof. The other thing is make sure your ad is relevant and your headline is extremely compelling because one of the other key things that Google uses to determine how much you’ll be charges is the click through rate. The better the click through rate the less you’ll pay per click.

Stay tuned for part 3 of this series on the steps to starting an Internet business.

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I've had posts featured in a number of business and finance blog carnivals recently. Here are links to some of these carnivals -

How to Make Money Doing What You Love - Issue #4

Blog to Earn - Friday Edition

Internet Business Blog Carnival #14

Featured my post Free Blog Traffic - How to Get More Traffic to Your Blog

Carnival of Business and Entrepreneurship 23 

Carnival of Sales and Management Success - May 31st Ed 

Internet Business Blog Carnival - 16th Edition 

Featured my post  Creating a Customer Loyalty Strategy – How to Reach Your Business Profitability Goal

Working at Home Blog Carnival #84 

Making Money Online Business Ideas - May 7th Ed 

Featured my post Increase Targeted Web Site Traffic – It’s All in a Name 

 Thanks to all of them - There are some great posts in these carnivals. Give them a visit. You never know what you'll discover; you may find the next idea to explode your business!

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Instead of merely working harder, you need to work  smart. The smartest thing you can do in an Internet or any other business is to leverage other people's resources to make money. It's the same weather you're in business online or you have a traditional bricks and mortar (nice old phrase from the '90's) business.

With that in mind, here are the steps you'll need to take in order to start your Internet business and make it a success.

Step 1 to Starting an Internet Business -  Set specific, quantifiable goals. It's not enough to say “I want to make alot of money” or “I want to make enough to quit my current job” Although you may, in fact, want to do both of those things, you'll need to be far more specific when taking this step.  Something on the order of “I want to make $12,000 a month in gross, monthly, revenue by the end of 2008” is more appropriate. The next thing you'll have to do as part of this step is actually write your goals down. It works well for many people to post them in a prominent place, so you'll have a constant reminder of where you're going in your business.

Step 2 to Starting an Internet Business- Resolve to take action. This is important, but in many cases it never gets done. You have to make a resolution to yourself that you will achieve the goals you've set for yourself and your business.

Step 3 to Starting an Internet Business- Determine what action you're going to take -  This is actually an action in an of itself. You will have to actually show some initiative and take action just to determine what action you'll be taking as you begin to move your business forward. Set a time limit on this, lest you suffer from "analysis paralysis". This is a very common problem, as many people get overwhelmed and never actually do anything.

To combat this tendency, break up your requirements into a series of small tasks you'll have little trouble completing. Focus on only one of these at a time. Make sure it is complete before moving on the next. When this step is complete, you'll have a plan of attack that you can follow. Again, make sure you write this down. This plan will actually become the marketing plan component of your overall business plan.

Step 4 to Starting an Internet Business – Take action. This is the most important step. The vast majority of people out there watching game Wheel of Fortune and playing the Lottery, while letting thoughts of wealth run through their minds will be doomed to eternal failure for the single reason that they never actually took any action. They just plain never showed initiative and actually did anything, besides wish for success. Unfortunately for these people wishing won't drive people to your website, yank the credit card from their pocket and fill your Pay Pal account with cash. You actually need to market a product or service to make that happen.

If you just decide what action you're going to take and actually take it, you'll be ahead of 95% of the population that sits on the sidelines thinking rich people are lucky. Well, to a great extent you make your own luck. A moron that does everything wrong, but actually does something stands a far greater chance of becoming a success in their Internet business, than a genius that does nothing.

Step 4a to Starting an Internet Business - Research a niche. In fact you'll probably research many niches before you find the one that you'll start with. How do you research a niche? That's been the subject of more than a few reports books, and special bonus offers, but you use the tools at your disposal on line. For example, there's a little website you may have been to on occasion called Google that's worth it's weight in Gold when you're doing research. They have a tools section with many resources for just such an occasion. In time you'll begin to use more advanced tools for niche and keyword research, such as Wordtracker and Keywordspy to determine exactly which keywords are profitable, but for now you won't need to go to this level of sophistication. That's for a later step in the process.

When researching niches you'll want to look at a number of things. Does the niche receive traffic? If people aren't looking for a solution or showing interest in the niche, your chances of making money in it are severely limited. The key is to find people that are looking for a solution and are willing to pay for it. If you market correctly, they'll pay you for it, or you'll be paid for it by those actually selling the product, but more on that later.

How do you determine how much traffic a prospective niche gets? You can use Google's webmaster tools, such as Google trends and "Top Search Queries" reports, to determine the relative amount of traffic the niche receives. Trends is great because it tells you weather no not the traffic is trending up or down. Other great tools to use for help in this area include eBay Pulse and Technorati.

The next question that you'll answer is weather or not the traffic in this niche is looking for a solution you can provide or help to provide. If people are looking for solutions that include products that can be sold over the Internet or information that you can provide to them over the Internet, than the niche has possibilities.

The next step is to determine weather you can profitably provide the products or services from the Internet. If the people are looking for information, but are unwilling to pay for it, then the niche is probably not worth your time, unless you can find a new angle that people are willing to pay for. The same holds true for products. While many products are successfully sold over the Internet there are some that are not as successful. Niches that concentrate on products with successful track records of Internet sales are the ones you want to concentrate on.

Again, Google can be a help here. Use Adwords tools to find out how much people are bidding for keywords within a niche. Chances are if other business owners are willing to pay a large amount of money to bid on particular keywords, there's a reason for it. They are either completely misguided, or the keywords are making them money. The expensive keywords can point the way to profitable niches, but don't rely on them exclusively because they can't find all the good, profitable niches, they're just  one tool to use for help in this area.

There are two schools of thought on finding a marketing niche for your business. School number one on niches says that you want to find a small, under served niche that you can dominate. The theory here is that if you narrow your focus enough there will be a group of hungry customers that just aren't getting what they need. Since there is little competition for this small, but hungry group of buyers, you can swoop in and fill their needs, while making a healthy profit at the same time.

School two, on the other hand takes the opposite tack. The followers of this school of thought opine that you'll find more success by targeting a huge, proven niche with millions of customers, and just grab a small, yet profitable piece of the pie. Who's right? Well they both are. There are many successful marketers following each strategy. In fact many marketers follow both strategies and market to different niches. Basically, you'll choose between being a big fish in a small pond and a small fish in a large huge lake.

In my next post I'll look at the next series of steps to starting an Internet business. Stay Tuned.

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In many cases contractors will be required to be bonded to get a license to ply their trade, but this is not the same as insurance. Such a bond, called a surety bond, merely insures that in the event you fail to complete a contract, the contractee can recover damages from the bond. The bond does not protect you as a business owner, it protects your customer.

If you have a substantial amount of office equipment in your home office, you should at least ask your homeowner’s insurance company to give you a home office rider to protect the contents of your office. In many standard homeowners policies, the contents of you home office will not be included.

Small business liability insurance is very important for most types of small business these days, even if you have a home based business. Should you say the wrong thing you risk a defamation lawsuit, you could be sued for a product you’ve sold, or a customer could be injured on your property. All of these events could be devastating should you be uninsured. Liability insurance will protect you and your business against such a problem. There are many situations where a liability problem could arise that your insurance would kick in to protect you.

If you are a consultant, you could give advice that causes a problem. This could precipitate a lawsuit. One of your employees could damage someone else’s property in the course of business and you would be liable for the damage.

If you run any type of business out of you home that requires you or any employees to drive company owned vehicles during the normal course of business, such as process serving, delivery, contracting or landscaping, you’ll want to get business vehicle insurance. Before you hire a new employee, be sure to have their driving record checked to make sure that they are insurable or that they will not raise your rates too much. This can also protect you against any liability incurred while you or an employee are driving the vehicles. Your standard auto insurance will not cover for business related use in most cases.

If you do contracting work for some companies, they’ll require you to name them as an additional insured on your insurance policy, thereby indemnifying them against damages to the limit of the policy. That way they can be more protected against problems because they are protected by your policy. In that case you better have insurance, because you’ll need to show them a certificate naming them as an additional insured; you can’t just bluff your way through it.

The most important thing for your business is liability insurance. It only takes one slip up by an employee on someone’s property, or an incorrect consulting opinion to cost your business plenty. Typically the most cost effective option is to check with an insurance broker that represents multiple lines and specializes in small business insurance. You’ll get some piece of mind and it probably won’t cost as much as you think.

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There's a saying in the so-called Internet marketing industry; “The money is in the list.” Leaving aside for a minute that the term “Internet marketing” describes a communication medium applied to marketing, not an actual industry, that's true not only for those of you selling online, but to any other type of business as well. A large part of the intrinsic value of your company is in your customer list. If selling your company is part of your exit strategy, having a long list of existing customers is going to be a large component of the value others see in your business. Simply put, you'll be able to sell your business for a much high price if you have a long list of satisfied customers.

When considering ongoing operations, having a list of loyal customers makes reaching your business profitability goals so much easier. Instead of focusing your marketing efforts on creating new customers within your target market, you can aim at a list of proven buyers. You're much more likely to generate another sale from a customer who you have an ongoing relationship with, and who has bought from you in the past, than one who knows little about your business, products, or services.

Think about it, would you rather have a list of 500 prospects, or a list of 500 accounts? I thought so. Weather you have a contracting business, accounting firm, or consulting company, having an ongoing business relationship means the customer will call you first when they need something, rather than seeking out someone new. People generally take the path of least resistance when trying to get something done. It's just human behavior, and marketing is nothing if not the study of human behavior. Calling your business when they need what you provide should be that path for your existing customers.

If your business exists in the online space, the ability to mine a list of existing customers for new sales is of incalculable value. Weather you're an Internet marketing newbie or a “Guru” building a list is of primary importance. One of the first thing that any new Internet marketer is told is “capture that email” so they can begin an email marketing campaign. While that is definitely an important part of generating sales and profits, a list of actual customers, not just prospects, is of much greater importance.

When someone gives you their email address in exchange for a report, e-book, or newsletter, all you know is that they have some level of interest in what you do. You really know little else about them. How qualified a prospect they are you'll not know until you begin your email marketing campaign. A list of actual customers, those who have already purchased from you is infinitely more valuable. You absolutely know they are a qualified lead because they have demonstrated such by handing over their hard earned money to your business in the past.

The reality is that if you have no customer loyalty, your business is just creating a marketing and promotional campaign, not a viable, long term business. Eventually you'll exhaust the supply of new customers in your market, or the ROI of your marketing efforts will be too high to sustain your operations.

Given the importance of customer loyalty, it's amazing that so few businesses create a formal customer loyalty strategy. Sure, many businesses have a rough idea about creating customer loyalty, but few formalize the strategy. Business owners will talk about good customer service, selling quality products, delivering them on time, exceeding customer expectations, and making sure they attend to the details that keep customers coming back. While all that is certainly important, it's not a formal strategy that can be refined over time to maximize performance.

To have a formal customer loyalty strategy, you need metrics that can be measured to determine the effectiveness of your efforts. That way you can see if your strategy is effective, and make changes in an effort to improve it. You'll know weather or not your changes are working or not and be able to create an actionable strategy. It points to discovering as much as possible about your customers, what motivates them to buy from you, and why they return. You'll want to measure their overall customer experience, and if possible, improve upon it. Your business depends upon it. A 1997 study by Patterson, Johnson, and Spreng found 78% of the decision to repurchase something from a business was based on customer satisfaction.

How can you measure and increase customer satisfaction and use it create a customer loyalty strategy? It depends on the metrics you use to define your customer's experience, but some of the more effective ones are delivery time, product selection, relative price, ease of use of your website, call back time, ease of contact, and satisfaction with the product / service as delivered . Some things, such as time can be directly measured and assigned a value. Others must be measured on a scale with multiple points. In many cases a 5 or 7 point scale is used to define such variables, with responses ranging from extremely unsatisfied to extremely satisfied or some variation thereof. You get the point.

To make your measurements even more effective, the different attributes should be weighted. This will help in defining which components have the greatest impact in the overall level of customer satisfaction. For example, satisfaction with the product or service may have more weight than delivery time. That will depend upon your customer base and the type of business you're operating.

One of the most important findings in the 1997 study was that meeting or exceeding customer expectations was the prime factor in reported customer satisfaction. It makes perfect sense, but if your business meets or exceeds customer expectations, they'll give little thought to using your services again, fail to do so and you create a disconnect in their minds that soon extends to their wallets. Basically you'll not get them to extract that Visa from their wallet again if they weren't happy the first time.

On the flip side, studies indicate that customers give little or no thought to using your business again if you exceeded their expectations. That's the best thing you can have, a loyal, repeat customer that automatically buys from you. Your strategy to create customer loyalty at that level should focus first on customer satisfaction and the customer experience, and second on ensuring that you are staying at the forefront of offerings in your field. As trends emerge, you need to be at the front of them in order to give your customers no reason to turn elsewhere to satisfy their future needs. They'll be your loyal customers untill the end, and that's the real key to reaching your buisness profitibility goal.

Have a great weekend, and here's to your home based business success!

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The question faced by most marketers is “how to get more traffic to your blog?”. After all many niches are extremely competitive these days and without good, targeted traffic, your blog may as well be notes in your journal.

There are some things to consider before you initiate your free traffic generating plan. You could always pay for your traffic, through paid links and PPC ads, but this is about the kind of traffic you get fo’ nuttin’. If you’re starting out inour business with a minimal budget, that's the kind of traffic you need.

Where is your free traffic going to come from? You’ll have 2 main free sources; links from other websites, directories, and blogs, and SERPs. You want to get balanced traffic and not be too dependent on the search engines, who are notoriously fickle. You can be getting great traffic numbers from them one day, and way down in the results the next.

Links are great for two reasons. You’ll get visitors from the link itself, and you’ll get a vaunted backlink, one of the most important things in the algorithms most search engines use to rank web pages. To get targeted links in to your blog there is one tool that I’ve found to be extremely effective; the blog carnival.

Blog carnivals are themed blog events that are hosted by bloggers. In such an event other bloggers are invited to submit their postings to the host blogger, who then posts links to the submitted posts in a post of their own called a carnival. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the potential of such an event, especially for a business owner with a new blog, and relatively few inbound links.

Some carnivals will include any post that’s submitted, while others are extremely picky and only include the best 5 or 10 posts they receive. The great thing about carnivals is that they themselves tend to get ranked fairly highly by the search engines, and you can get traffic from them.

Where they shine however, is that they generate inbound links, and some bloggers have removed the “nofollow” tags from their blogs, meaning that you’ll get the full benefit of said links from the search engines to help increase your search engine rankings. In addition, you can choose the anchor text of the links, allowing you to build search engine rankings for your selected keywords and phrases.

Some of the carnivals have fairly high readership and you can get significant traffic from them if you have compelling post titles. You should also include a brief description of your post, both to assist the host, (although sometimes they’ll not use it, due to the theme of the carnival) and to provide exactly the content you want around your link. You’ll also get to showcase your writing talent and post content, which can help you get regular readership and subscribers, a real boon to your marketing efforts.

The other thing that you must do to ensure high rankings in the search engines is to optimize your posts, including the post titles. I wrote about this in a previous post with regard to search engine optimization. It is key that you title your posts so they read exactly as the keyword phrases people are searching for. There is a more in depth discussion of keyword optimization in a previous post on how to increase targeted web site traffic. The same thing applies to blog post titles as the titles for web pages.

These things should help you get more free traffic to your blog. Good luck and Good Business! 

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As a business owner, weather you exist primarily in the online or off line space, you absolutely must appeal to all your potential customers in order to maximize sales, profit, and efficiency. Yet many business owners, especially in formerly male dominated industries, completely or substantially ignore women in their marketing efforts.

This mistake can have devastating results to your bottom line. Think about this for a second. 80% of all checks signed in the U.S. are now signed by women. Women also purchase 80% of all consumer goods and own half of all U.S. businesses. They are the most rapidly growing segment of new business owners. That doesn’t sound like a market you’d want to turn your back on.

You may think because you sell auto accessories, consumer electronics or sporting goods you can ignore women as customers. Don’t; that would be a stupid and possibly fatal mistake for your business, because women actually buy, or are key decision makers in the majority of such purchases.

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, since 2003 women have bought more consumer electronics products than have men, so that worm turned a long time ago. In 2005 women purchased $65 billion wroth of consumer electronics, and influenced billions more. According to a survey in Sporting Goods Business, women influence 95% of all sporting goods purchases.

That means that if you have a home business that sells things, and there’s any chance that women are among your customers, you need to be making every effort to cater to their needs and wants, even if you feel that your business is more focused towards men.

How do you make sure your business is meeting the needs of your female customers? Women and men shop differently. They tend to process information differently than do men. When women are making purchasing decisions, they are more likely to ask questions until they feel they have a good grasp on a product, it’s features and benefits (you are selling features and benefits, aren’t you?). Men, on the other hand shop more like they drive. They won’t ask for nearly as much help as they may need to find what they’re really after.

Be sure you design your web site to give your women customers the answers they’re looking for. They’ll reward you by buying something from you. Women tend to be more brand loyal than men, a great thing for your business if you cater to their needs. Women have less tolerance for websites that are difficult to navigate and aren’t well designed and laid out than do men. If they can’t get their questions answered easily, they’ll shop at your competitor’s web site.

You should also tailor your product mix to be sure that your women customers can find what they may be looking for. Do a bit of research if you must, check with you vendors, offer surveys to your visitors and sift through your site logs to determine what products were the most popular to browse and buy.

If you sell aftermarket auto and truck parts, you may think that your business is the last place you’d find women shopping, but aghain, you’d be wrong. A woman is just as likely to be shopping for a Greddy turbo kit or a Dana 60 front axle with an ARB air locker as are men. Well maybe not quite as much, but you get the point.

In fact women buy quite a bit of aftermarket auto parts and accessories. According to the Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Association (SEMA), the industry association concerned with making sure every kid with a Honda also has a muffler the size of a coffee can, nice rims, and a pair of 12” subwoofers, women actually buy less hard core performance parts. What they do buy is alarm systems, floor mats, fog lights, window tinting, audio / video systems. 21% of women in a survey done by trade journal Aftermarket Business reported that they installed all their own aftermarket parts.

The point is that you not only have to meet the needs of your women customers if you’re selling weight loss products, cosmetics, and designer clothes. You have to make the same effort to meet their needs if you’re selling fishing supplies, basket ball shoes, aftermarket automotive accessories, and home theater gear. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table.

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In this business climate, even if you operate a business that has nothing to do with Internet marketing or selling online, it is key that you maximize the targeted traffic to your web site. Simply maximizing traffic will do little good, other than using up your valuable bandwidth. The traffic must be targeted for specific keywords that you want to be found for on the web.

How do you choose the proper keywords, and how do you help ensure you’ll be found for them? There are a few things to do when optimizing your site or blog to grab the traffic you want. Don’t have a blog yet? Get one, and soon. It‘s one of the most valuable marketing tools you can have, for many reasons, not the least of which is the way it can help increase your visibility and ranking with the search engines.

When choosing keywords to target your site for, there are specific things you should look at. First, you want to determine what will have the most value to your business. For example, if you have a business consulting firm, you obviously want to be found when someone does a search for business and consulting related terms, but it goes deeper than that.

Do you have a specialty within your general business discipline? If you operate in the physical space, what about geographical terms? You would do better to be found for people searching for business consultants in your area, if you are set up primarily to do consulting for local businesses.

The more direct your targeting efforts can be, the greater the value of the traffic to your business, and the better you can optimize your web site or blog to rank well for your specific keywords. There are many so-called ‘on page’ optimization techniques you can use to help your site rank well, but before you ever even get that far, you have to start at the top.

It all begins with the name of the page or site. If you choose it correctly, and optimize the title, and then the on page factors, you will have a much easier time of things when you are indexed, ten ranked by the search engines. You want to choose terms that people are actually searching for.

The reasons for this are two fold. Reason number one is that by choosing keywords that people are actually searching for you will obviously get more targeted traffic, simply because there are more people searching for those terms. But the second reason, and the more important one, is that you will provide value to your visitor. After all, if they are looking for a specific term that is what you want to be found for. Your visitor will have higher satisfaction and you will have a better chance of gaining a customer.

When choosing keywords, it pays to be specific in most cases. For example if you provide business consulting services, as in the example above, you would do better to be found for your specialty within the business consulting arena. By segmenting your broad area into a specific niche, you will be found by those visitors that will attach the most value to finding your site. Conversely, you will also be found by those visitors that have the most value to your business, because you are exactly what they’re looking for.

The secret you must know to increase targeted web site traffic - The most important takeaway from this post is this, however. It’s extremely important exactly what keyword phrases you optimize for. You can have multiple phrases, all specified, and all with the basically the same value to your visitors and your business. These can have subtle differences in phrasing, but the phrases can have wide differences in the number of searches that are performed for them, and perhaps even more important, the number of competing web sites that there are that rank for those keyword phrases. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about.

Take this post, for example. I didn’t choose the post’s title arbitrarily. It actually requires research. When doing research for exactly what the title of this post should be, I was confronted with several options. I knew that I wanted to do a post to help home based business owners get more traffic to their web sites and blogs.

What I didn’t know was exactly how those business owners were asking for help when they went to search for it in the search engines. That’s where the research comes in. I needed to determine the exact search terms that were being searched for, and how much competition there was for each. There may be some keyword phrases that have very high search volumes, but if there are millions of other websites out there that rank for those phrases (not an uncommon scenario) I would stand little chance of ever being found for them, no matter how good my content other on page factors was until I had hundreds or thousands of links from other sites pointing to this post (the number of high quality links to your site from other web sites is one of the primary factors used by the search engines when ranking your site’s pages).

The key then is to choose keyword phrases with a relatively high number of searches, but a lower number of other sites that are found when searching for them. As I mentioned above the difference between good phrases and bad ones is often very subtle, and here are some examples of just what I mean.

When doing the research for this post I found the following different phrases were searched for on Google:
increased web traffic

increase web traffic

increase web site traffic

increase targeted web site traffic

boost web site traffic

generate web site traffic

get web site traffic

As you’ll notice, there is very little difference grammatically between some of the phrases. However, the differences between them in terms of how many people searched for them, and how many web sites can be found when searching for them is huge. Here is what I mean. I’ll list those phrases again, followed by 2 numbers; the number of people searching for them each day on Google, and the number of web sites that Google ranks for each phrase.

increased web traffic                            195 / 43,000

increase web traffic                             209 / 42,000

increase web site traffic                               260 / 337,000

increase targeted web site traffic          22 / 22,000

boost web site traffic                           12 / 7,420

generate web site traffic                      9 / 13,100

get web site traffic                              9 / 37,300

Note how some keyword phrases have much more competition, and thus would be much harder to be ranked for than others, even though the differences from a visitor value standpoint would be slight. For example, although there are a comparatively large number of Internet visitors searching for the phrase ‘increase web site traffic’, there are also many other sites that show up in the Google search engine results pages (SERPS). That would make it a poor choice unless you were pretty confident that other factors would allow you to rank well in the results. A better choice would be one of the results that had far fewer competitors, so you would have a chance to actually be found for them.

To choose keywords and phrases that fit these criteria, you’ll need some help, but thankfully there is help to be found. There are several research tools that you can use when deciding on what to name blog posts or web pages. Google has a nice tool, the Google keyword suggestion tool. You can enter a keyword or phrase and it will show you a list of many other related phrases or keywords and how much relative traffic there is for them. You can also see how much advertiser competition there is for the keywords among Google Adwrods advertisers.  

Another one that I use on a regular basis is the free keyword tool from Wordtracker. It gives more detailed information such as specific numbers of visitors, and how many visitors the number one result on Google gives. Yahoo used to have a nice tool the old Overture as well, but it is no longer….RIP.

So, when trying to get the most targeted web site traffic for your businesses’ web site and/or blog, remember, it’s all in a name.

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As with any economic condition, some will be affected negatively by an economic downturn, but there will be great opportunities created for others. It’s your job as a business owner to find those opportunities. You have enough to do just running your operation, so here are some ideas for businesses that do especially well in bumpy economic times. You can focus your business on such opportunities, or if you’re just getting started, use these as a guide (in no particular order). All of these businesses can easily be operated out of your home.

As with any successful business, those that prosper will be those that create value for their customers. When economic times are tough the quest for value becomes even more acute. The demand for certain businesses grows as the demand for others shrinks. Inexpensive luxuries related businesses will tend to do relatively worse in a recession or economic downturn.

For example, selling $5.00 coffee drinks may not be the path to success when people begin pinching pennies. On the other hand, a business helping people pinch those pennies and weather the recession could net you big profits as a home based business owner.

Best Home Based Business Opportunities For a Bad Economy 1
Credit Consultant – This is one business that experiences a huge upswing in demand when times are tough. You can earn handsome fees by helping people through credit problems and getting them on the path back to excellent credit. Help them set up budgets, prioritize their spending, analyze spending habits and credit offers, raising FICO credit scores and basically anything else that becomes a big problem when money gets tight. It can be a great gig; help people and be well rewarded for it, financially and otherwise.

You can also do credit consulting for businesses. For many businesses, their credit is the financial lubrication that keeps their business operating efficiently and smoothes out their cash flow. They’ll benefit from your services with increased efficiency and higher operating profits.

Best Home Based Business Opportunities For a Bad Economy 2
Debt Collection Agency – It goes without saying that when times are tough more people have trouble paying their bills. If you have experience in the credit or collections industry, you can leverage this into a nice career helping businesses ensure payment of their bills is a priority for customers. The reality is that when business or consumers begin having trouble paying their bills, they’ll pay the ones they feel are important, while letting others go unpaid.

A skilled debt collections agency (you?) is invaluable when it comes to convincing these creditors that their client’s invoices should be one of those given top priority. You should have prior experience in this field and be familiar with all state and local laws pertaining to debt collections. You can go at it alone or purchase a franchise.

Best Home Based Business Opportunities For a Bad Economy 3
Low Cost Goods Provider – In a recession or poor economic times consumers and business become much more price sensitive. In fact if times are poor enough, price becomes the over riding factor people use to make their purchasing decisions. If you are a low price goods supplier that puts you in an excellent position to make a profit by supplying needed items at a very low cost.

For home based business owners this is a godsend. Due to the low overhead of home based businesses, they are well positioned to become just such a supplier. Using the Internet for their marketing and drop ship fulfillment centers as suppliers a home based business can create a very large presence supplying goods in any number of needed categories at the low prices consumers and businesses demand during these times. Other considerations typically used to make purchasing decisions, such as service and quality, will become secondary, and price will reign supreme.

If you can be the low cost supplier, yet keep good service and high quality, you’ll be set to retain customers when economic times improve. Such a strategy can set the stage for a strong business now and in the future. Therein lies another reason to keep your overhead low. Every cent you increase your overhead must be accounted for in your price structure, so pinch pennies. If you can make a case for increased ROI, then by all means spend away, but far too many business owners never do any formal ROI analysis. Make sure you’re not one of them.

You’ll typically want to target a market segment where you can get a competitive advantage either in distribution or supply, preferably both. If you can get an exclusive distribution agreement on a product or service with solid potential, you’ll obviously be well positioned to thrive in the marketplace. While such an advantage isn’t essential, it will take some pressure off you as a marketer, because selling an exclusive with built in demand is much easier than having a host of competitors.

How can you ensure you have a competitive advantage? Basically, you have to grow a set. No supplier is just going to call you out of the blue and drop a valued product line at your feet. You have to find a product, or series of them, that is in demand, or would be so if it was correctly marketed, yet currently has limited distribution. It’s usually easier to find this type of product in the specialty arena. Develop a marketing plan for the product line that ensures you are well positioned to take advantage of its growth. Usually you would be set up as the exclusive distributor.

There are two points here.  The first is to make sure that the product / service will be in equal or greater demand as the economy loses steam. The second is to make sure that your marketing plan guarantees the manufacturer or higher level distributor will increase their profits and or sales by implementing your marketing plan. If you can make the case that they’re fools not to implement your plan, you’re half way to that new Hattaras you’ve always wanted.

It won’t be easy to pull this off, but I know several marketers who have done so, and more who are trying all the time. The greater tragedy is that too many people never really implement their plans. You have to not only find the product(s), but you have to develop the plan, then, most importantly, implement it. It’s the action and follow through part that trips up so many people. You have to have persistence, and be prepared to hear about 3 million “no’s” before you make your first deal. But you have to think big, and never give up.

Best Home Based Business Opportunities For a Bad Economy 4Foreclosure investor. Look around you. What is growing as the economy is hitting the rocky road? That’s where you want your home based business to focus. One such candidate for these trying times is in foreclosure investing. The veritable epidemic of foreclosures in some areas presents an opportunity for the astute business owner to capitalize on. It’s not an easy road, but can generate some tremendous profits. You’ll not only need to locate foreclosure properties, but know which to make deals on and which to steer clear of. Purchasing the wrong one could leave you deep in debt, instead of rolling in dough.

Remember, the keys to success in poor economic times are much the same as when times are good, only the products and services differ. You must find those who have an immediate need for a critical solution. The more immediate the need and the more serious the problem they need solved, the great your opportunity as a marketer and business owner. Keep this in mind when plotting your path .

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