Copyright 2006 Lynn VanDykeThere are a few secrets that I’d like to share with you.  You may have been privy to a few of them before.  Actually you may have heard of all 4, but I can promise that you will finish each article with a fresh perspective.  I will show you how 4 simple secrets can create a powerhouse web business.  This is the first part of the 4 article series.

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Before I divulge the vault of successful web business secrets I must warn you of one thing.  All the information in the world will not take the place of determination and persistence.  A web business is just like an offline business.  It takes hard work and resolve to succeed.  However working smart is heads and tails better than plain old working.  These 4 secrets will turn any smart working, dedicated average Joe or Jane into a successful web business owner.

Web Success Secret #1) Content is king.Heard that before?  I know I have.  The thing I never knew was how to use content to my advantage.  Content is useless unless it is optimized for the search engines.  It must also be optimized for your reader.  You have two customers- readers and search engines.  You must satisfy both with the same exact content.Content is king only if you have exact and highly specific keywords placed in correct locations.  Unfortunately the hard part is determining what keywords to use.  A keyword can be a single word or a phrase.  It is the term that web surfers use to search for information.  Place yourself in their shoes and try to discover what search terms they use.  You must then evaluate the search term.  How many people search using that term?  How many sites already deliver information on that search term?  Simple demand and supply rules.  The more demand with the less supply equals more profitability.You have several options for determining keywords and their profit potential.  Search yourself, pay a company to search for you or have your hosting company do a complete keyword search for your niche or web business topic.  If your hosting company does not offer this service I recommend you switch to a plan that does.  This feature alone can make or break your business’ future.  If you would like my recommended hosting plan, please contact me.Without a proper keyword search and analysis you may as well forget about becoming successful with an Internet business.  Investing in this one secret is literally the start of planning your website.Your next action step is to plan your site layout based on the 50-175 high-demand and low-supply keywords. Your site should be structured in three tiers.  Tier one is your home page.  Tier two is made of all of your main topics and also constitutes your navigation bar buttons.  Tier three keywords are sub-topics of tier two pages.  Organize your 50-175 keywords into three tiers.  Doing this makes it easier for visitors to navigate through your site and it makes it easier for search engine spiders to find all of your pages.Search engine spiders do not like to fish around for all of your pages and links.  This is why many sites offer a “site map”.  A site map is one page that contains links to all of the content pages.  This is a fine route to take; however most people agree that pages with a lot of links on it are valued less than content pages that casually link to other content pages.Using three tiers allows you to go from topic to sub-topic to sub-sub-topic all by natural in-content links.  For example, tier 1 is the homepage on a fitness site.  Tier 2 is a page all about cardio activity and its benefits.  A tier three page off of that tier 2 page is about different treadmill routines.  Do you see how the site visitor would like this structure?  They click on “Cardio” and are given links to more specific pages about cardio topics.  Search engine spiders like the three tier structure too.  It means they do not have to dig through layers and levels of useless links.There is even more to content than finding profitable keywords and structuring your site into easy-to-navigate tiers.  You must optimize each and every page on your website to perform well and rank high at search engines.  Many people devote their working life to optimization secrets.  A full length article just on optimizing is possible.  Heck, a full length book is possible.  My recommendation is to use a hosting company that automatically teaches you how to optimize web pages for the engines.  Doing that will cause less headache and frustration and it will keep you focused on building content.A quick education in optimization: place your specific keyword in the file name, title, description and keyword section of your page.  Then sprinkle the keyword throughout the content.  Also provide a link using your specific keyword in the link text.  If all of this has you spinning your head, I recommend going the hosting company I use.  They literally teach you to build a website using blocks.  It’s all simple and easier than you think.There is one last piece to content.  It must effectively pre-sell your product or service and position you as the expert in your field.  When your website has 50-175 optimized pages for your visitors to read through it will start to position you as the expert.  Your site will become known as the place for information about (insert your niche).When visitors find your site through search engines they are seeking information about a problem or question they have.  If they land on your site and you try to sell them something right away one thing is sure- they click the back button and find another site that will give them information.  This is why pre-selling your product or service is paramount.  Give your visitors what they want.  Answer their question and in the process let them know about your services and products.All of the information develops rapport and trust with your site visitor.  It positions you as an expert.  It keeps your visitor on your site longer since they are actually reading content.  Search engines notice this and rank you better.  How well your site can keep visitors is known as “stickiness.”  Your site must attract and keep visitors for as long as possible.Provide content that pre-sells your products, positions you as the expert and focuses on highly profitable keywords.  You cannot go wrong with your web business if you do those things.  The secret to content is to satisfy both your visitor and search engines.  Lose one or both and you are doomed.  As I mentioned earlier, it is best to work smarter and not harder.  Your hosting company should be providing most of these services to you free of charge.  There are a small few that do this, but it is well worth the investigation.  Contact me for further resources and information.  Having a successful web business starts with effective content.  Stay tuned for parts 2-4!

 

This is a continuation from my first article on RSS – “RSS Mania Addiction – An Introduction to RSS and the Terminology”

The best way to automate your complete process of social bookmarking is available at bookmarking demon. Also – automated social bookmarking is the best way to take your search engine ranking to the highest level in no time at all.Well so now you kind of like, are in love, or are obsessed with RSS. Those little orange buttons are all over and you want to put one up in your web site or Blog or on your wall. That is cool, and it will demand a bit of technical knowledge, some writing, some research and some frustration. So here are the major steps to publishing your RSS feed and giving all that information to the world at large, which I will discuss in depth with examples in this series of articles. Right now we will outline these steps.1. Sit back, STOP! & Think. (How is that for step one?) * a. Do you have information that should or would go into an RSS file? Remember that the unwritten rules of RSS is that you must update the file with “new” and more “current” information if not hourly or daily, but at least on a fairly common basis. No one is going to want to keep your RSS in their reader if the information they see every day for the next month is exactly the same as the day before it. * b. Additionally, though some people do this, it really is NOT good practice to put long essays into an RSS feed. What you want is the first line or description of an object, idea or news. Hook the person so he clicks on the topic in his reader, reads the summary, clicks again and finds himself on your web page. * c. Do you have the time to do it? There are millions of Blogs out there that were started with the best of intentions. One entry, two entries, three entries. And then they die. Why? Because the author/owners simply had no clue about the dedication demanded and time needed to update their Blogs on a regular basis. They also had no idea just how difficult he competition was to get people to read those Blogs. The same is true with RSS. You start a feed to get readers, or to pass on information to the web. You need to understand this is going to take time and patience and work. This is not a one-time one-shot one-pie-in-the-sky deal.2. Your depth of Technical knowledgeYou will need to become familiar with the following terms and understand them and perhaps learn some very simple things in how to program them. 1. RSS 2. XML 3. HTML 4. CSS 5. Atom 6. RSS Readers 7. RSS Parsers 8. RSS Validation3. Now begins the Actual WORK! * a. Preparing the file – You will need a template RSS file (for the sake of these articles it will be called rss.xml though it can have any name you choose as long as it is in xml format.) Unless you are good enough to write one yourself this is critical.    * b. Understanding the Template and what information goes where    * c. Putting the information into the template – Each piece of information you have will go into specific [headers] and you must understand the RSS structure in the XML file to get that right.    * d. Validating the Template – A crucial aspect. Unlike HTML, RSS is very, very, let me say this again, very unforgiving. It does not like deviations from the norm or from the basic format laid down. Getting it right can be the most trying and frustrating part of the process.4. Okay now you wrote the RSS file, your XML file is ready and validated. Now what? Guess you think you are done. Think again. * a. You will have to place the rss.xml file on your web site or somewhere on the web where people can get to it.    * b. Now you can steal, get, copy, make – whatever you choose – your own little XML/RSS or RSS – Valid button.    * c. Hyperlink your file to the RSS    * d. Submit your file under the correct category to RSS directories.5. How many people will pick up your RSS? I will discuss this as well in a later article, but surprisingly, the answer here is still very vague. There are some ways of tracing the numbers, but none are foolproof, and most are very convoluted.6. Go and get a good night’s sleep cause tomorrow you are going to have to start the process of adding information to your RSS (or changing it) all over again!(This is a continuation from my first article on RSS – “RSS Mania Addiction – An Introduction to RSS and the Terminology”)Copyright © 2005 Ted W. Gross. All rights reserved. (You may publish this article in its entirety with the following author’s information with live links only.)