SEO Venture

Vertical Jump Training Blog - Helping You Elevate Your Game!

2010-10-25T22:30:00.000-07:00

With two sons playing competitive basketball there has been a lot of discussion around our home about how to "get more hops" or increase their vertical jumping ability. Talking with the kids on my youth league teams and my sons teammates confirmed that this is a really hot topic not only among basketball players but also among volleyball players, soccer players and more. Having hops is a big asset in many sports.

So my sons set out to "get more hops". We purchased the Air Alert vertical jump system and gave that a try. Both sons completed the program and saw marked increase in their vertical jump just not to the extent guaranteed by the developer. We then tried "The Jump Manual" by Jacob Hiller. Again, my sons some some increase in vertical jump but not as much a guaranteed. Still, they both agreed both programs were worth the money and the time and effort put into completing them.

Still, trying to increase their max vertical jump, I began to do a lot of research online. I quickly found their is no lack in people and sites pushing their programs and extolling the reasons why their program is better than all the rest. Doing this research proved to be tedious and time consuming. So, I decided to put together a blog that brought together all the different programs, theories and training program related to vertical jump training. Thus, the Vertical Jump Training Blog was born. Get More Hops! doesn't push any one particular training program. Rather, we strive to present the many varying points of view, training techniques and the many vertical jump training programs available. We bring it all together and let you decide what will work best for you.

Justin Michie's 30-Day "List Getting" Training Program

2010-05-25T10:32:00.000-07:00

I don't often recommend many training programs but you should check out Justin Michie's 30-Day "List Getting" training program. It starts on June 1st and you should think about being part of it. Justin is the author of the highly regarded book "Street Smart Internet Marketing", which you should also read.

By the end of the course, Justin personally guarantees that you'll have an opt-in email list of at least 500 people (and that's starting from scratch) or you don’t pay anything. And with each subscriber worth about $1.00 per month in profit, you're going to start making a lot of money pretty quick.

A high quality list of targeted subscribers is like having an emergency cash fund for anytime life throws you a curveball. Want more cash? Just blast out a quick email to your list and the money shows up in your account like magic. You can learn more here.

For Veteran Social Marketers, Twitter is Tops!

2010-04-30T12:24:00.000-07:00

I've only played with using the social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Myspace for internet marketing purposes. However, I also have a blog dedicated to my hobby and I have a Twitter account that I have associated with that. Whenever, I post a new item on my blog a corresponding Tweet is created. I also Tweet whenever something of interest to my fellow hobbyist happens. I have noticed a significant increase in my blog traffic as a result of my Twitter activities. My blog and Twitter compliment each other as I have picked up followers on Twitter from my blog traffic and vice versa. The amount of traffic created has convinced me that marketing through social networks is worth looking into.

In an interesting article on emarketer.com it would seem that experienced internet marketers have been on board with social networking for some time, as many as 96% of marketers with extensive social media experience are using Twitter while 91% of the same group report they use Facebook. Now I need to research and understand how to increase my following of these social networks. If anyone has such experience, I'm listening!

Street Smart Internet Marketing by Justin Michie

2010-04-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

I have downloaded my share of internet marketing and SEO e-books the past few years. Some I paid for and some were free. The vast majority of time I was disappointed. Most were shoddily written and prepared documents with little or no useful information. Many were simply regurgitations of material you can quickly and easily find elsewhere on the internet for free. Of course, I shouldn't have been disappointed as the main purpose of these free offers is to get your email address to add to their marketing list.

I recently acquired a free copy of Street Smart Internet Marketing by Justin Michie. As usual, I approached it with my typical skepticism. However, a quick perusal convinced me that this book was different. First, this was no quickly and sloppily thrown together piece of junk. This is a quality, 308-page pdf document with loads of useful information. There are 38 chapters in seven sections covering topics such as:

Electronic marketing
Designing and building a website
Email marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Website Promotion
Joint Ventures and Affiliate Marketing

This book was originally written in 2006 but Justin Michie has revised it and brought it up to date for 2010. This isn't a book you will read through in an hour or two. It will take time to read and digest. When you are done you will want to keep it handy for frequent reference. I had yet to write a review of an e-book because, quite frankly, they weren't worth the time they took to download much less write a review. This book is different. Take my word for it, Street Smart Internet Marketing by Justin Michie is a book you should take a serious look at. It's free so what do you have to lose?

SEO Venture Follow Up

2010-02-16T11:30:00.000-08:00

Well, here it is half way through February, 2010. I thought I would take a few minutes and summarize my SEO Venture experience and results. And by the way, I checked earlier today and found that my site, www.snowmanornaments.org was still ranked on the first page of Google results for my primary search phrase "snowman ornaments".

I learned a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), web site design and marketing during this little experiment. Using the various techniques that I learned I was indeed able to get my site placed on the first page of Google and, at one point, one actually ranked number one! So, I can definitively say that SEO marketing techiniques work, if done correctly. It is work, it takes time and effort but it can be done.

What I also learned was the extreme importance of getting started early particularly if you are talking about a seasonal niche market as was mine. I started my experiment near the end of October for a Christmas seasonal niche. That was way too late! I should have started at least two month earlier. Yes, my site reached a #1 Google ranking on December 9th but that was too late to make any money that season. People have already made the bulk of the decorating purchases by then and I was still failing to drive traffic to my site.

That is the other major lesson I learned. You can have a great Google ranking, even number 1, but if you don't drive traffic to your site what does it matter? Traffic for my site started to pick up just in the month of December, again too late, and didn't generate any sales. Based on what I was seeing on other specialty ornaments sites I don't believe my niche was too narrow or not viable. I just failed to rate highly soon enough and failed to generate enough traffic to generate sales.

Because of my late start I can only call my SEO Venture a partial success. Yes, I was able to create a web site and within a couple of months have it ranked on the first page of Google. However, my other goal was to see if money could be made and that I did not do.

So, my SEO Venture experiment will continue. It will go on hiatus for the next several months but around July or August I will pick it up again. This time with the goal of generating real revenues. I will get an early start with a web site that already has a high Google ranking. There will be work to be done, a web site rewrite most likely and then I will need to learn how to drive traffic to the site. Hopefully by this time next year I will be reporting success on the second goal of my SEO Venture. In the mean time I will be reading up and learning about how to drive traffic to my site. Until then!

We're Number One!

2009-12-09T08:08:00.000-08:00

Wow, I must admit to being very excited about this! My SEO Venture website, www.snowmanornaments.org, has the number 1 ranking for my keywords when I checked this morning! I guess the keyword changes and the additional content I added late last week were the key to putting me over the top. My site jumped from the mid-70s to number 1 in only 5 days!

Check this out:

The lesson I learned from this is to pay extra close attention to your keyword selection and 'on page' SEO. Spend time with Google Analytics and other tools to determine the best keywords for your niche. Don't hurry or scrimp on effort here. All the books, blogs and articles reinforced this but I guess I had to learn it by trial and error.

The changes I made to my keyword metatag were minor but simply duplicated what Google Analytics were reporting as the most searched for keywords in my niche. Honestly, I thought I had previously made many of these changes but apparently not.

All this makes me wonder how much sooner I could have ranked in the top 2 pages of search results had I made these changes earlier. Of course, that is why I took on this experiment in the first place. To learn from my successes and my mistakes and to pass on my experiences to you. So, I must consider the first part of my SEO Venture a success! I have successfully started a niche website and succeeded in getting it ranked #1 on Google.

Unfortunately, I fear I am too late for this seasonal niche to see much income from my website. It is now December 9th and most people have already purchased their decorations and decorated their homes. To reiterate the key lesson I've learned here, when working with a seasonal niche market make sure you give yourself enough lead time to develop your niche and get ranked highly. I should have started at least a month earlier than I did. However, this does bode well for the next holiday season!

Search Rankings Stalled

2009-12-05T07:42:00.000-08:00

Well, all the 'on page' and 'off page' SEO that I have been doing has landed my website, www. snowmanornaments.org, in the 69-79 range in Google search results. It seems to have stabilized in that range. It is a definite improvement over it's debut spot of 129 but not good enough to see substantial traffic as a result. So, today I did a little more keyword research using Google Analytics and made some changes to my meta tags on the website. I think I spotted a few mistakes I've make that may make a difference.

I freely admit to a certain amount of frustration on my SEO Venture experiment but also have to keep reminding myself that I am a newbie at this after all. I've done the major things all the SEO books and articles suggest and still haven't seen the desired results. I'm sure there are a number of steps and nuances that a SEO guru may have already taken to have obtained better results. However, I am committed to seeing this through whether or not it happens soon enough to take advantage of the holiday season.!

SEO Tip: Don't Forget About the ALT= Tag

2009-12-04T15:02:00.000-08:00

A while back I wrote a post about 'on page' SEO techniques. In it I failed to mention that you should avoid using images, flash animations, etc., to the exclusion of plain text that includes your primary keywords. If my website is about snowman ornaments but all it has is a bunch of pictures of snowman ornaments as links, when search engine spiders crawl my site they will have very little to work with to determine its context.

This is because search engines can only read the text (html) on your website. They don't have the intelligence to understand the content of an image, flash animation or other graphic used your website. That is, of course, if you forget to use the ALT= tag in the IMG SRC tag. The ALT= tag was originally created to give web surfers some idea of what image was supposed to be displayed should their browser be unable to do so. By placing their cursor over the image box shown when an image fails to display the alternate text would appear in a pop up box describing the content of the image.

However, the ALT= tag also has benefits for SEO in that search engines can and do find the text found in them. So be sure to utilize the ALT= tag and include appropriate keywords in addition to the text on your website to help the search engines correctly determine the content of your website. Don't try to stuff the ALT= tag with too many keywords as most search engines will penalize your ranking as a result.

This all came up as I was taking a look at my Google Analytics to see exactly where traffic to my site was coming from. I noticed that Google image searches were resulting in a decent percentage of my traffic. So I went to Google and did an image search for my primary keywords 'snowman ornaments'. It returned two hits for images on my site on the third page of the search results. That is much higher than my site ranks using the same keywords on a Google Web search.

However, since people can scan image search results much more quickly and easily than text search results they will page further into the results to find what they want. Being on the third page of image search results was good enough to produce significant traffic to my website. So, don't forget to use the ALT= tag or you will be ignoring a great way to drive traffic your way!

Search Rankings Beginning to Rise Again!

2009-12-03T08:20:00.000-08:00

I didn't get a lot done to promote my SEO Venture over the Thanksgiving Holiday. I was hoping that 4 days off would give me some free time to build some more backlinks to my site and do a bit of content updating on the site itself. Well, the time was there but I guess the tryptophan from the turkey just made me too lazy.

I did, however, spend a couple of hours trying to build some backlinks on Friday. I understand that Google weights one-way links back to a site more heavily than reciprocal links so I focused my efforts that way. It also weights 'authorative' sites more heavily as well. I did create a few reciprocal links to sites that were relevant to mine. Google likes that better than links to and from irrelevant sites.

Well, here it is a week later and I think (hope) that I am beginning to see some results. Google and the other search engines have had time to index some of these new backlinks and update their rankings. At last check my search ranking rose to 69 out of approximately 113.000 results for my prime keyword phrase. Still not good enough but getting better and my highest ranking yet. If you recall, my site premiered at # 129.

I am encouraged because I feel I understand off page SEO a bit better and am developing a grasp of the basics of what needs to be done to push a site higher in the rankings. I am certain now that I should have started this venture a month or two earlier in order to get my search rankings on to the first two pages on Google during the prime Christmas buying season. Oh well, live and learn and this is a very important lesson. Make sure you understand your seasonal niche market timing and how long it takes to rise in the search rankings. This is especially true if you are a newbie to this as am I. I'm sure an SEO guru could already have my site on page 1 of Google. Then again, that is the purpose of this whole exercise, isn't it?

Article Publishing as an SEO Strategy

2009-11-28T11:45:00.000-08:00

An additional strategy I learned and you should consider is writing articles to help promote your niche site. There are a large number of article repository sites like ezine.com and 411article.com among others that allow you to join and publish your articles for free. These articles are then available for webmasters and bloggers to use freely on their sites, blogs or e-newsletters as long as the proper attributions are given.

The important thing here is that the article repositories generally provide a resource box or signature box where you can write a short bio and other info that is attached to the bottom of your article. In these resource boxes you can include URLs back to your niche or other web site. As the articles are downloaded and incorporated into website, blogs, etc., backlinks are being created to your niche site. These backlinks help build your credibility with the search engines and, thus, your search ranking.

Of course, you need to focus on producing a quality, original articles about topics that have value to readers. Don't just throw something together just to get a backlink. The poor quality will be obvious and you will see the results in the form of poor traffic to your articles. Be sure to proofread and spell check your articles before you publish them. Maybe ask someone else to proofread it for you and make suggestions on how to make it more useful and readable. Remember that you have one chance to make a good impression on a reader. Make a good one and they will return to read your other articles. Make a bad one and they will likely ignore your articles in the future.

Be aware that these article repositores have editorial guidelines that must be adhered to. Among those guidelines are restrictions against blatantly commerical or self-promoting articles. These will almost universally be rejected. However, if you have developed some expertise on a certain topic, preferably relevant to your niche site, then write articles on that topic. As the library of articles you write grows you will develop a reputation as an expert in the field, build backlinks to your site and see your search rankings rise.

Dazed and Confused!

2009-11-24T17:31:00.000-08:00

Well, at least confused anyway. I mentioned in my last post that my site had climbed up to #83 in the Google listing. When last I checked, I had fallen all the way back to #114. Now, I understand that the ranking will fluctuate but I am surprised and confused by such a large drop. I would have expected to maintain or slightly improve my ranking as the on and off page SEO I had done gets indexed over time. I see I still have a lot to learn about SEO and niche marketing.

Search Ranking Improves!

2009-11-20T07:33:00.000-08:00

If you recall, a short while ago I made some changes to my SEO Venture website, www.snowmanornaments.org in hopes of improving it's search ranking. When first indexed it came in at number 129 for my primary keywords. Not too impressive. I did some additional on page SEO and some off page SEO and saw the number flucuate and finally settle in the 103-114 range.

Knowing that fresh, original content is the best way to improve the ranking (at least with Google), I added an additional 3 pages of new content to the website. Only one day since adding the new content the search ranking has climbed to 83. It is strong evidence that original content weighs heavily in Google's ranking algorithm. Still not where I want it to be but SEO techniques have moved it up 5 pages in the search results. It is encouraging news but I still have a long way to go with precious little time before the Christmas window closes. It reinforces in my mind my concerns that I may have started this venture a month or so too late.

Bad Planning and Lessons Learned

2009-11-19T11:22:00.000-08:00

It has been a week and a half since my SEO Venture website, www.snowmanornaments.org, was first indexed by Google. In an earlier posting I mentioned that my original search ranking was 129. Since then the search ranking has varied between 102 and 154. I haven't been able to break into the top 100 yet. Not that being on the ninth page of Google search results is going to drive traffic to my site. It would be nice, though, to see that some of my efforts are having an effect. Being a newbie at this, I really don't know how long I need to wait to see results from those efforts. Maybe I am being too impatient.

In hopes of improving my ranking, I have made some tweaks to the on page SEO and begun some more off page SEO. The off page part is proving more difficult than I expected. It seems there are also fewer 'authoratative' websites out there in my market niche than I expected thus making it harder to get quality backlinks.

Going on the wisdom that the single best thing to drive traffic to a website is original, useful content for users I have added 3 pages of additional content to the site. Hopefully, Google and the other search engines will crawl it soon and like what is sees.

Unfortunately I am beginning to realize that I should have begun this seasonal niche website at least a month earlier, if not more. In my ignorance I thought that my website would be indexed faster, that the backlinks I was creating would be discovered faster and that my content was good enough from the start. I appear to have been wrong on all counts. I fear that more time will be needed for my website and SEO campaign to 'season' than I have left before Christmas.

Though there still are 36 days until Christmas, people don't buy ornaments and decorations up to Christmas day. They want to have acquired them and put them up in advance of Christmas, of course. So, not having taken this into account, my website really needed to be up to speed 3 or 4 weeks earlier than I originally estimated. Bad planning on my part. On the positive side, I've got a really good jump on next year when it will be fully seasoned and ready to go with little work.

The Initial Page Rank of My SEO Venture Website

2009-11-09T11:02:00.000-08:00

Today Google finally indexed my website for the first time. This is a big step in my SEO Venture because Google is far and away the most popular search engine in the world. Without being indexed by Google my SEO Venture was destined to fail. Not that being indexed was a guarantee of success for that matter.

Nevertheless, I was thrilled when I was first able to Google my website. My initial page rank was number #129 out of approximately 114,000 for my "snowman ornaments" keywords. That put my site in the top 2% for those keywords. Unfortunately, with Google reporting 10 hits per page that put my listing on page 13 of the search results. Nobody was going to page that far into the search results to find me.

Of course, that is what this whole SEO Venture is all about, right? To learn about SEO and see if SEO techniques can really push my website onto the top 2 pages of Google search results. Clearly, I have some work to do here. I have chosen a market niche, developed a website, done some 'on page' SEO optimization, published the website and, now, been indexed by Google. A lot has been done in only 2 weeks.

I'm sure as I analyze statistics from Google and other sources I will be required to tweak my 'on page' optimizations. That is to be expected. Nobody, especially a newbie like me, gets it perfect the first time. Now the real work begins. How do I drive traffic to this unknown website? Now I begin the "off page" part of my SEO optimization. More in a later post ...

My First Feeble Steps with 'Off Page' SEO

2009-11-05T11:21:00.000-08:00

Now that my SEO Venture website, Snowman Ornaments & More!, has been indexed by Google it is time to begin 'off page' SEO efforts. From what I've learned 'off page' SEO entails building a lot a backlinks back to my website. Quality as well as quantity is the goal here. What I want to see my page rank rise is a good number of quality backlinks with sites Google deems have 'authority'. The more backlinks from authoritative sites the better. This is called "Link Popularity".

Building link popularity is what off page SEO is all about. It involves increasing the number of websites that link back to mine. This is hard, time consuming work. The best way to get quality backlinks is to have unique, informative content. This really is the best way to get websites to link back to mine. Content, however, is in the realm of on page SEO and not the topic of this posting.

So, here a the off page ways to help build my site's link popularity.

Social Bookmarking Sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.). I've joined several of these sites and created entries in them for my website. Each of these entries each include a backlink to my site. The entry on Digg was indexed within hours because of its highly dynamic content. However, the entry on Stumbleupon has yet to be indexed.
Social Networking Sites (Facebook, Myspace, etc.). I joined Facebook and created a page for myself there. In it I have created backlinks to all my websites.
Article marketing. I've submitted several articles to ezine.com and 411article.com. For every article, I have a resource box where I have a short bio and a link to my website. As the articles are accepted and published I will have a backlink to my website.
Forum marketing. I have found a number of online communities dedicated to the subject Christmas decorations and decorating. I joined several of them and began participating in the forums. I was allowed a signature box which included the URL of my website. With each forum posting a backlink to my site was created. Be aware that some sites flag forum comments as 'nofollow' that instruct search engines not to follow that link. This impacts your page rank negativley.
Place advertisements at www.craigslist.com . Craigslist is a well known classifieds website with a very high page rank of PR7. I posted an advertisement in the appropriate category that included a link back to my website. Some people have created ads in multiple geographic locations but be aware that Craigslist may have started a geotargeting policy by allowing you to post advertisments in your own geographic area.

I tried to implement as many of these strategies as I can. But, as you can guess, this can take a lot of time and effort. I have to remind myself to be patient during this process. Just as it took a week for Google to index my website, it will take time for these links to be crawled and for my site to rise in the page ranks. Also, as a newbie, I have no idea which of these strategies will be most effective and which will be a waste of time. I will endeavor to determine which is true and tell you about it in a later post.

Just Sharing a Tip

2009-11-04T15:21:00.000-08:00

I just discovered a neat little trick I would like to share with you. One of the main aspects of "off page" SEO is getting backlinks from other websites back to your website. In general, the more backlinks you have the better your search ranking will ultimately be. The problem was how to determin just how many sites have links back to your site.

It turns out that Yahoo has a neat little feature you can take advantage of that will identify those backlinks. In the search box, type in 'site:' followed by the URL of the site you are interested in (see the red box in the image above) and click the search button. Yahoo will return all the sites it finds that have links back to the requested URL. Nifty!

Unfortunately for me, Yahoo found only 2 sites with backlinks back to my SEO venture site. Not too impressive! I guess I need to work harder marketing my site. Of course, my site has only been live for less that a day. Anyway, that is the topic of my next blog, "off page SEO"!

My SEO Venture Website Has Been Launched!

2009-11-03T21:39:00.000-08:00

www.snowmanornaments.org went live as of today! I was very excited to get it online but it took a lot of time and work. I have hosted my website on Godaddy.com primarily because the hosting account I already had allowed multiple domains to be hosted on one account and had unlimited bandwidth and disk storage. This is important to me to keep my expenses down on the SEO venture.

Now my site is out there live on the web but no one knows about it. The major search engines haven't indexed it yet and I understand that it may be up to a week before Google gets to it. So, unless I give people the URL so they can access it directly or they stumble upon it themselves, traffic will be minimal for some time. Unfortunately, traffic is what I want so I need to find ways to drive traffic to it. This is the other half of SEO.

In my last posting I blogged about appying SEO techniques to the website itself. This is also called 'on page SEO'. The other part of SEO is called 'off page SEO' and it entails techniques to publicize my website elsewhere on the web. These techniques include such things as backlinks on other site, social booksmarking, social networking, webrings, blogging and more. I will discuss these in my next posting.

Applying SEO to the SEO Venture Website

2009-11-02T15:18:00.000-08:00

In order for the website to rank high in search engine results it is important to optimize the website code. This process is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Since Google is by far the most popular search engine in the world, I will refer to Google when it comes to search engines but the principles and practices apply to all modern search engines.

Google like all major search engines sends spiders and bots to crawl the internet and index the websites they find. I don't want to go into how search engine spiders work but you can read about it here, if you want to learn more. And you should because the more you understand about them the better you can optimize your website.

Until Google has indexed my website the only way people can find it is by knowing the URL to get to it directly or by finding a link to it somewhere else on the internet. However, most people find new websites by using search engines. So it behooves me to have as high a search engine ranking as possible.

Most people searching for something on Google will not browse past the second or third page of search results. So, my web page needs to be in that range. Hopefully, it will appear in the top 20 hits or first 2 pages, preferably it will appear in the top ten hits or the first page and, ideally, it will be number one. However, I'll settle for the first two pages of hits for now.

There are several things I have learned to apply to my website in order to optimize it for the search engines. First, is to choose a domain name that includes my primary key words, 'snowman ornaments'. So, I chose www.snowmanornaments.org as my domain name.

Next, is to include the same keywords in the title tag in the html code of my site. The text in the title tag is what appear on the web browser title bar and is a prime place that Google's spiders look to determine the content and context of a website. I also made sure the meta tags also include my keywords and other key phrases. There are two that I am interested in, the description meta tag and the keywords meta tags.

Two other SEO techniques are to include my keywords in the H1 header tags of my site and to include alternate text in the ALT= tag for all my images. The H1 header tags should give the user and the spiders and good idea as to what that particular page of my website is about. The original purpose of the ALT= was to be able to display text describing the image should there be problems displaying the image in a user's browser. However, Google search robots will take a look at the tags as well as the H1 header tags, meta tags and title to help determine the content and context of a website.

Finally, the content of the site itself weighs heavily on how my site is indexed. It is important to include the actual keywords in the content of the website. Not only is it important to have fresh, original content but it is also important that your keywords occur with enough frequency to reassure the search engines the site is about what you say it is about. This is called keyword density and the old standard is that your keywords should comprise 7-12% of the site text. However, many think that keyword density is now passe but still it is important to mention your keywords frequently in the text.

Finally, I put an XML sitemap in the topmost directory of my website. XML sitemaps are used by the search engines in order to index through the site. The sitemap is a list of all pages on my site also includes information such as the date the page was last modified, as well as a priority number of what I feel are the most important pages of my site. All these things help the search engines find and link to all content of my site.

There are a number of additional things that I will do to optimize my website more over time. Be aware that applying these SEO techinques to your website will not result in an immediate increase in your search ranking. Search engines have limited time and resources to devote to indexing websites. These spiders are programmed to determine if a site has content that changes frequently and will learn over time to visit it more frequently to re-index it. The spiders don't have this history on new sites so it will take some time for them to learn your website and visit it accordingly.

Launching a Website

2009-11-01T15:15:00.000-08:00

My next tasks are to identify snowman ornaments and other products that I want to market and launch a website on which to do so. Now, I have an extensive background in computer programming and web development. With time running short before the holidays I knew I didn't have the time to develop a website from the ground up. So, I went about looking for a website template that would meet my needs and be easily modifiable. I simply googled the phrase "free website templates" and starting perusing the results. A few hours later I ended up choosing a free template that I really liked and had the benefit of keeping my start up costs down.

I needed snowman and holiday graphics to include on the website. Unfortunately, I don't have much experience working with graphics and little, if any, artistic abilities so I went about the business of finding graphics on the internet. I wanted quality graphics with high resolution and that fit the red, green and white color scheme of my template. It is important to use quality graphics as the web site is the primary interface to my market and first impressions are important. I don't want the site to look cheesy or amateurish.

It is important to honor copyright and trademark laws. Whenever possible I select images and graphics that are in the public domain to keep expenses down. An image in the public domain is free for everyone to use without asking for permission or paying royalties. Google is a great way to find these images and graphics. It may take a little time and patience but it is well worth it. You don't want to infringe on anyone's copyright rights and have to respond to a cease and desist order later. If you can't find an acceptable public domain image, you can always buy them from one of the many stock photo site like Fotolia.com.

More on launching the website next.

Affiliate Marketing or Drop Shipping?

2009-10-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

After having decided on a market niche and having acquired a good domain name, the next step is to locate a source of product to sell. Not being a maker of snowman ornaments, my two main choices were to locate a supplier that does and drop ship or enter into an affiliate marketing relationship with a company that does. As I am actually getting a bit of a late start on the holiday season, I elected to take the affiliate marketing route.

Affiliate Marketing is a revenue sharing arrangement between a website owner and an online merchant. The website owner places advertisements on his website to help sell the merchant's products or to send potential customers to the merchant's website in exchange for a share of the profits. The share of the profits can vary from a few percentage points to upwards of 75% depending upon the merchant and the product.

In order, to find potential merchants to affiliate with I went to Commission Junction and opened an account. Commission Junction provides a central place for publishers (me, in this case) to find advertisers with affiliate programs. There I used their search features to identify those merchants in my market niche with affiliate programs. Then I applied for affiliate status with a handful of those merchants. Some merchants would approve the affiliate relationship online while others manually reviewed each affiliate application. There is no guarantee that an advertiser will accept your application. The application review process could take several days to over a week so you should jump on this quickly in order to line up merchants for your web site.

Now I have my market niche defined, decided how I was going to generate revenue and set up affiliate marketing relationship with a number of merchants in my niche. The next step is to identify individual products I want to push and develop a web site. I will cover these topics in my next post.

The Beginning of My SEO Venture

2009-10-29T18:35:00.000-07:00

For some time now I have toyed with the idea of starting an SEO marketing campaign just to see if it could really work. Could I really make money on the internet? However, I didn't feel I had the requisite knowledge nor the time to make a go of it. Taking that attitude, of course, meant that I would never give it a try and find out. The busyness of my job and family quickly pushed the idea into the recesses of my mind.

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a webinar about SEO and niche marketing. I found the content interesting and even learned a few things. The desire to try an SEO venture was quickly rekindled. By chance I bumped into friend a few days later that was into internet marketing and he offered to give me a few tips. He told me how you have to take advantage of the markets and opportunities as they arise. He went on to discuss seasonal niche market oppoturnities such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.. This coincided with the information I had heard during the webinar.

The key he said was to define your niche market to one that has high interest but not a lot of competition. Then he volunteered to help me to come up with a niche to market. As Halloween was already upon us and Thanksgiving just a month away those opportunities were already past. There was not enough time to get into those niche markets this year. However, Christmas was still over 2 months away. Not a long time but maybe enough time to give it a shot.

So we brought up Google as started searching for key words. I wanted to find a Christmas-related product or products(s) to market without too much competition. Naturally, we thought of Christmas ornaments. However, if you Google "Christmas ornamnents" you will get over 5 million hits! Not much chance of me dominating that market. That's a pretty large niche! So we narrowed it down more. Angel ornaments (539,000 hits), reindeer ornaments (76.500 hits), snowman ornaments (69.500 hits). Now we were getting somewhere. We found some other niches with fewer hits but they weren't traditionally popular kinds of ornament. We thought it better to stick with something popular.

So, snowmen ornaments it was. The first thing I needed to do was secure a domain name that included my key words. The first rule of SEO is to have a domain name the includes your key words. A quick jump to Godaddy.com, my current web host, revealed that snowmanornaments.com was already taken. Drats! However, snowmanornament.org was still available. Ideally the .com address is better but the .org and .net domains are next best. The .biz, .tv and .info domains should be avoided whenever possible.

Ten bucks later that domain name was mine. Fortunately, the hosting package I already have allows for multiple domains to be hosted under one account and for unlimited bandwidth and disk space. Cool! I was going to be able to try this experiment at minimal expense. My next task was to locate a source of product to market. I'll talk about this in my next posting. Until then!