Then how do I keep up with all the blogs I like?

No the way I do it is through RSS. RSS stands for really simple syndication and is a way to easily keep up with all your favourite blogs in one easy reader. I have written an article explaining RSS and RSS readers so you may want to have a look at that if you are unfamiliar with RSS and the convenience of it.

Most publishers / bloggers will enable RSS on their blogs and will make it easy for new readers to subscribe. This is important, because if you or I stumble on a blog we like we want an easy way to quickly subscribe and not forget about that particular blog.

How to subscribe to a feed?

Most bloggers will have a clear RSS button in their sidebar, like I have here at Escala Web Strategy, or have a link with “subscribe to RSS”.

Now, the next time I open my favourite RSS reader (which in my case is reeder for ipad and iphone) the most recent posts of this website will appear alongside all the other blogs that I follow. I go though all the blog posts each night and will read the whole articles of the headings that interest me.

Whole article versus excerpt in a feed

However, here is when an issue can occur. Although most publishers will have their whole articles in their RSS feed, some only allow the excerpts to be uploaded to the feed. This means that if I wanted to read the whole article I would need to click through to their website.

I am actually VERY unlikely do do this. It means that my reader will have to load the website in the browser which also means that I would have to need a good internet connection. It basically intereferes with the speed that I can normally read my articles. Also, I sometimes load my feeds when I’m online and then read them later when I’m offline. In that case I’m not even able to click through to the website.

Why would a publisher only upload the excerpts to their feed?

The main reason for publishers to only allowing excerpts in their feed is that most publishers want you to read the article on their website instead:

• It means that their website traffic is higher, so they can command higher fees for advertising,
• When people visit the website they may click on advertising which leads to profit for the publisher
• A website visitor may click on affiliate link which can lead to a commission for the publisher

So as you can see there are many benefits to people actually visiting your website.

So why do many publishers allow their whole article to be uploaded to the feed?

There are some major benefits to allowing whole articles in your feed:

• People are more likely to read your article
• People will not delete your feed in their reader (due to annoyance over excerpt only)
• People are reminded of your blog on a constant basis and may clickthrough when you have something special to offer.
• You will build a relationship with your readers as your readers will value the conveience of reading your posts through their RSS readers.

So what should you do?

If your main objective of your articles is to get people on your site than you can consider excerpts only, but if your interest is that as many as people as possible READ your articles, then whole articles are definitely the way to go.

I personally delete feeds that only give me excerpts of their articles. That means that I will probably forget about your blog and will never visit your site again.

So even though many RSS subscribers will read your articles without you knowing about it (you will see the amount of RSS subscribers you have if you use a service like feedburner, but cannot see how many actually actively read your blogs), they will remembered about your blog and website constantly. This means that they will still read your aricles, possibly link to them in their own blogs and every now and then visit the website. In my opnion this building of a long-term relationship with a reader is so much more important than a constant website visit. In the end allowing full article feeds will pay off big time.

Can you really make money with a website?

Yes, you can. Many are doing it every day. However, it will take work and dedication and it may take you a long time to see results. Online marketing is NOT a get rich quick scheme. Please don’t believe any of the ads and websites promising you that you can make thousands in 30 days. It just doesn’t happen. They may show you cheques as ‘proof’, but all too often ‘make money online websites’ just make money ripping off people believing in the dream of getting rich quickly online.

However, if you are willing to put in the work, do proper research before you begin and come up with a good web strategy, you could create an income stream for yourself that could turn into passive income. That is one of the reasons I am now concentrating more on my own websites, rather than creating websites for others. I prefer to earn money with a passive income stream, so that I get paid even when I’m not working!

How can you make money with a website?

There are various money making models:

1. You can earn money through advertising. You can sign up for an ad network like Admax or sign up for Google Adsense. Every time someone clicks on one of the ads you get a small commission. If your site becomes more successful you can also attract advertisers by selling your own banner ads or sell in text links.
2. Another way is through affiliate marketing. You can see that in action in this post. Basically when I recommend a product or service in this post, I can provide an affliate link. This is a special link given to me and whenever someone clicks on that link and continues to buy something, I get a small commission. As a customer you don’t pay anything extra, only the supplier will have to pay me a part of their profits. Sounds really easy and it is, but you will need sufficient traffic to your website to make it profitable. You will be amazed at how many established brands operate an affiliate program and it’s usually very easy to join. 2 popular affiliate networks that I use are Commission Junction and ShareASale. You could even add a complete affiliate shop to your site. A plugin like Datafeedr for WordPress makes that easy to do. If you want to have a complete guide on how to do affiliate marketing then I can recommend The Super Affiliate Handbook by Rosalind Gardner, which is an ebook from a successful affiliate marketer than you can download instantly.
3. Create a membership site. If you can create a lot of value on your site, you can add sections for members only. Only members that have paid a certain amount per month will be able to see that content.
4. You can sell your own physical products! It has never been easier to setup a shop online. As I explain later you could use WordPress with the Ecommerce plugin or use a very quick shop setup like Shopify.
5. You can sell your own downloadable products like ebbooks. These are becoming increasingly popular through the use of e-readers and kindle. You could sell your ebooks through Clickbank or Ejunkie
6. You can build an optin email subscription list. Many online marketers use their list to market their products and do very little selling online. In order to get people to subscribe to the list, they offer something for free. Very often this is free information, like I do here on Escala Web Strategy (new email subscribers receive a free report on how to start getting successful with blogging). Tools to create your list include Aweber, IContact and Mailchimp (the tool I’m currently using; it’s free!). The email marketing tools make it easy to manage your list, create emails and insert subscribe boxes to your website.

Find a niche

A niche is a particular topic or market for which you could write. For example, if you are really interested in Argentine Tango you could choose to start a website on that topic. It is usually best to choose a niche (topic) that you find interesting. Building a succesful website will take a lot of time and effort so you will need to make sure that you have enough to write about. Start by making a list of all the topics that you find interesting. Then narrow it down to those topics that you could write about and start doing some keyword research.

Keyword research is very important as it will determine how much traffic you get to your website. In order to get traffic to your website you will need to target a particular keyword for your niche, so your website gets found in search engines. Of course there are other ways to promote your website (like ads, social media, and article writing) but you would really want to get a high amount of free search engine traffic. The majority of the traffic of my sites comes from free search engine traffic, especially through Google.

Keyword research

This is an essential step before starting a niche site. You will need to make sure that you find a relevant keyword to your niche but also one that gets sufficient amount of traffic and that has an ability to rank high in Google. There are various ways to do your keyword research. You could start with the free adwords suggestion tool or buy a keyword research tool like Market Samurai (free trial). I like to use Market Samurai as it gives almost instant information on how much potential a certain keyword has.

To determine the potential of a keyword, there are a few points to take into consideration:

1. You need to find a relevant keyword that matches the content of your website. If you want to make sales from your website you need to make sure that you get targeted traffic. As an example for our Argentinian tango website I chose the keywords “argentine tango”. For more info on this step please read my tutorial on how to do keyword research with market samurai.
2. You need to know if people are actually searching for that keyword. If noone does, then you will not get sufficient traffic to your website and your site will not be successful. I ran the keyword argentine tango through market Samurai and as you can see it gets 559 visits a day. That is very decent traffic. For a more in depth explanation please read my tutorial on how to find the right keywords in market samurai. 
3. Another very important factor is how competitive that keyword is. As you can imagine there are now millions of websites on the net. Many people are now trying to make a living from websites, so a particular keyword may already have too many established sites targeting it. A quick analysis shows that the SEO competition (SEOC) for this keyword is 1.180.000, which is very high. For more info on this step please see my tutorial on how do to research the competition in market samurai.
4. The last point to check is to see how commercial your keyword is. This point should not be overlooked. You may get a lot of traffic for argentine tango but if everyone is just looking for info and noone is buying anything, it may not be worth your while. Market Samurai shows that the SEO value (SEOV) for the keyword Argentine tango is AU$279.62 which is ok but not great. For more in depth info on this check How commercial is your keyword?

So should we pursue with this keyword? I would say no. The competition is very large and if you look at the strength of your competitors already ranking for this keyword, it will take a lot of effort to rank for this keyword. This does not mean that you cannot create a website about argentine tango though. However, you may want to go through this process again and look for more specific keywords that may have less competition, like argentine tango shoes or argentine tango classes.

This is an essential step in starting your online business. It can make a huge difference as to how succesful you can be.

I found my niche and my keyword, now what?

Once you have a niche and a good keyword that you would be able to rank for, you will need to find a domain name. You could get a website at WordPress.com or Google or any of the other websites where you can get a free website setup, but the problem with those websites is that you do not have your own domain name and you are not fully in control of your website.

You will get more authority (and also a lot more control over your site) if you get your own domain name. It helps if you can get your keywords in your domain name for ranking purposes. An exact match of your domain name would be perfect. Of course you can also get any other domain you like but it may take a little longer for you to get a ranking for your keyword. Instead of a keyword match domain, you may also choose to get a domain name that is brandable. In that case it should be short and memorable.

In general when choosing a domain name:

• Keep it relevant
• Only use a .com extension (you could also do .net but I would stay away from anything else)
• Keep it as short as possible
• Make it memorable
• Avoid hyphens
• Avoid strange letter combinations

GoDaddy is a good register to get your domains very cheaply.

How to get your website?

Once you have registered your domain name it is time to create your online business. There are several ways to create a website but a very easy way to get a good website is to use WordPress. Not the WordPress hosted websites that you can get at WordPress.com, but a self hosted WordPress website. It really is not as difficult as you think. With many hosts you can install WordPress with a few clicks! Here are some of the steps to take:

1. Select a hosting company. If you are going to use WordPress, make sure it is a WordPress friendly web host with one click installation (they need to have a service called Fantastico de Luxe). I use Hostgator and can recommend that to everyone who wants to have a reliable website host. They offer good support and WordPress installation is a breeze.
2. Once you have chosen your host, install WordPress. If you need help installing WordPress you could consider my visual WordPress Setup Guide. It gives you easy to follow instructions on how to install WordPress and getting started using it.
3. After you have installed WordPress you need to get a nice theme. You could of course keep the standard theme that is automatically installed for you, but I would recommend you get a new one so your site is easily distinguishable from others. There are lots of free themes available at WordPress.org. Some of them good, while others leave a lot to be desired. I actually prefer to work with premium themes. They usually are better designed and in many cases come with excellent support. If you are just starting out with WordPress, that support will really benefit you. Here is a list of my favourite premium wordpress theme sellers. All of them offer excellent support and great theme designs.
4. Now it’s time to start adding in the content. If you have done your keyword research, then apart from your main keywords, you have probably come up with a list of related keywords. Have a look at your keyword research again and create the structure of your website. Create categories for your posts that incorporate some of the other keywords that came up in your research.
5. Once you have a good structure, start planning your content and publish it. If you like to know more about how to blog successfully then just subscribe to my newsletter and I will give lots of blogging tips absolutely free!

How to promote your website?

Now that your website is up and running, you want to get more traffic to your website. So how do you do that?

1. SEO

My favorite method of traffic creation is SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. This is basically a collective name of techniques to get your website ranking higher in Google. Traffic through searches in the search engines are free and once you started posting on a regular basis, people will find you for a multitude of keywords. However, you will get the most traffic if your website gets ranked at number 1 for a popular keyword. If you have read my instructions on keyword research above, you will already understand how important it is to choose a keyword, that is relevant, gets decent search traffic and is not too competitive.

If you have found a good keyword combination, you will now need to make sure that you get a good ranking for your keyword. To do that you need to make sure you do the following:

• Ensure that your keyword features in the page title. The page title is what people see in the top of your browser. Search engines usually also diplay this title when people find you in search engines. You will need to make sure you enter a keyword rich but also enticing title. In order to make sure that you can enter unique titles (and later also descriptions and keywords) for each post and page of your website, you will need to insert special metatags. If you are using WordPress there are several plugins that you can install like the All in One SEO plugin. However, my current favorite is WordPress SEO by Yoast, a free plugin that actually helps you create your titles.
• Ensure you enter a unique meta description for each page. Make sure it includes your main keyword but also make it enticing to click on your website. Even when people find your website in Google, you will still need to given them a reason to actually visit your website.
• Enter keywords. Although not that important it is still a good practise to enter the target keywords for that post.
• If you include images in your post, give them a name that includes your main keyword. Also ensure that they have a good alt tag.
• When you start to write more articles, make sure that you link to other articles by linking keywords in the text. Never link text like ‘click here’, but always use informative links like: for more information visit our page of  argentine tango. (with the words argentine tango linked to your other page on that topic).
• All the above techniques are what is called Online SEO, but a very important part of SEO these days is offline SEO. The main component of that is link building. In order to get ‘authority’ or as Google also calls PageRank you will need to get a lot of links to your website. Google and other search engines will see your site as more important if you have more links. So how do you get more links to your website? That really is a topic in itself as there are many ways to get links, but some of my favorites are: guest posts at other blogs (very effective as you get a link + more readers), article submission, directory submission, writing link bait posts (posts that a lot of people will find very useful and will therefore link to), creating a quiz or application that goes viral etc. You can also look at which links your competitors have and try to get them as well. A good tool that you can use for  this is Raven Tools. Not only is this an effective tool for link building but it also helps with keyword research and tracking your search engine positions for your keywords. So much more to write on SEO  and link building, but that will have to wait for another time. In the meantime you can check an excellent link building strategy post that goes into great detail on how to build links fast. You can also check other posts I have written on the topic of internet marketing or sign up for my newsletter to get my ‘successful blogging‘ report (which goes into some more techniques for link building) for free.

2. Social Media

The social media are getting increasingly important as a promotion tool for your website. Not only can it generate a lot of extra traffic to your website directly, it can also create higher rankings in search engines as it can increase your authority. Make sure to register your website name or main keyword (argentinetango) at all social media and bookmarking sites, like facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter,  Reddit, Blogger etc. Not only will these profiles an extra link for you, you can also use them to promote your blog.

Make sure you create your own Facebook Page, especially for your website and get likes.

Setup a Twitter account and start connecting with people that may be interested in your website.

3. Advertise

Not free of course, but it can still be a good way to get initial exposure. You can measure how much money the advertising earns you. If you have a positive return on Investments, adverting can be well worth your while.

Google Adwords makes it very easy to advertise in search engines, and on just about any website. You will only need to pay for each click you get and how much you pay depends on the popularity of your keyword. Targeting the right keywords, writing a good ad and constant monitoring and measuring is very important for this strategy. If you want help with this you can visit my page on Google adwords advertising.

4. Offline marketing

Of course you don’t need to limit your marketing efforts to the online world. Write press reports, add your website to each email you send, try to get media coverage, go to the fairs. All these can help boost your website traffic.

Measuring your success

So how do you know what works for you and what doesn’t? Here is where Analytics can help. Google has a fabulous free analtyics tool that can tell you A LOT about

• your visitors behavior
• Which sites are giving you traffic
• Which keywords are giving you traffic
• Which keywords lead to actual sales (you will need to setup goals or events to measure this)
• How much time to visitors spend on your site
• How do they navigate your site
• Which are your most popular pages etc.

Now you may wonder why you need all this information, but it can really help you fine tune your content. Perhaps the sales copy you have written for the site does not convert so well? With Google Analytics you could actually do an A/B test and test 2 different versions of your sales pages and test which one converts best.

You will also get clear information on which keywords actually lead to sales. This is valuable information as you may want to target those keywords more in your SEO efforts.

In conclusion

Well there you have it. My very long post on how you can get started earning money with your website. Of course this information is just the tip of the iceberg of all the information that is out there on building a succesful website and doing SEO. Believe me, I have been in this business for more than 10 years and I’m still learning. It never stops really and I’m constantly trying out new things. Google keeps changing their ranking algorithm (factors that determine which page ranks higher), social media is continually eveolving and the internet space is getting increasingly competititve.

One great example

Bottom line is though that if you do proper keyword research and build a good solid website, add value online, entertain people and apply some solid commercial principals you can succeeed online. Try to find your own special niche, preferably in an area that is not so competitive yet. Here is a great example of someone  who thought outside the box and did their keyword research thoroughly. Mary Morris of Front-Porch-Ideas-and-More.com,  managed to turn her love of front porches into a very profitable website that gets more than 300.000 page views a month and earns her a steady income through advertising. In this blog post you can find out how she did it.

Find out where your passion is and find a niche that is not too competitive, do very thorough keyword research, build a good site structure based on that, create great content and consistently promote your website and you too could earn passive income online.

Let me know if you need more information or which parts are unclear. For further updates, tips and my free successful blogging report you can subscribe to the newsletter.

Wishing you a lot of success with your online endeavours and let me know if you have any questions! If you like this article then I hope you can share it with others using the share buttons.

All the best,

Sylvia

This last instalment of this series may not apply to everyone. But it is useful for those who are thinking of starting a new business for which search engine rankings are important. Or for those who want to build a new website with the purpose of making money online.

If your primary goal for ranking high in the search engines is to earn money it is highly critical that your target keyword phrase has commercial value. If you get a lot of visitors to your website but noone buys anything it may mean that your keyword phrase is not commercial enough. People don’t buy your product or service online or people are mainly after information.

How can you find out if your targeted keyphrase has any commercial value?

Google runs a succesful advertising program called Adwords. With their Adwords research tool you can find out what the average cost per click is for a certain keyword. In general, the higher the cost per click for a keyword the more commercial the keyword is. All of this is clearly explained in the below video.

All the best,

Sylvia

PS. If you have any questions regarding this part of keyword research then please let me know. If you want to try Market Samurai for yourself then sign up for the free trial

It also shows you exactly how to do it with Market Samurai. I have recently started using this program and it really saves a lot of time in the whole keyword research process. I have personally experienced how crucial this part of keyword research is. Do it right and you can have a very succesful and profitable website. If you don’t spend enough time on this, you may just waste a lot of your time and money.

Some of the key factors of Competition Research

You want to target keywords that are not that competitive. Some of the factors to look for are:

• How many competitors are targeting the exact same keywords (amount of competition)
• What is the strength of the competiton? (how many backlinks do they have to their website, how old is their website, are your targeted keywords present in the domain etc.)

Learn and enjoy!

Sylvia

PS. Stay tuned for part 4! If you like to try out Market Samurai for yourself, they offer a free trial.

Great!

However, if noone searches for those particular relevant phrases, you will still not get any traffic to your website.

That is why the second step is also so important: identifying how much traffic each keyword phrase can potentially get.

Have a look at the next video on how to identify keywords that can give you a lot of targeted traffic each day.

All the best,

Sylvia

For a free trial of this software visit the Samurai website

Why is keyword research necessary?

In general people will only click on the top results of all keywords results returned so getting a top ranking for your main product or service is crucial. If internet marketability is crucial for the success of your business you may even need to do this keyword research before you register your business name or register a domain.

You may think that you can just target your main service for which you know there is a lot of demand, eg. haridressing. However, for a a general keyword like that, there will also be a lot of competition. If a lot of the websites ranking high for that keyword are very established websites with a high pagerank and many relevant websites linking to them, then there is little chance you will get a spot on the first page of Google for that keyword. You can forget about getting a number one spot.

Finding keywords that are relevant but not so competitive

What you could do though is look for related keywords or keywords that are more specific. Some of these keywords may have a lot less competiton. Of course the daily search volume will be lower too, but if the daily volume is 100 and you are number 1 for that keyword phrase, a lot of those 100 will visit your website for a very specific service you are offering.

Using tools to do keyword research

There are a lot of ways to do keyword research online. However, I now use a tool called Market Samurai that makes it a lot quicker and easier. In addition they have a set of very useful tutorials that teach you how to use the software but also how you should do keyword research.

Learn about the 4 crucial elements of keyword research:

• Relevance
• Competition
• Traffic
• Commerciality

Since these videos explain so well what keyword research is all about and why it is so important, I thought I would share them on this site. This first video is all about relevance. Learn and enjoy!

All the best,

Sylvia

PS. If you have any questions regarding this part of keyword research then please let me know. If you want to try Market Samurai for yourself then sign up for the free trial

What has changed recently?

Local search results have become more prominent. For example if you search for hair salon, a large map will now be displayed at the right with letter markers on it. Many of the top search results will now be the businesses with those letters. For the hair salon search it went from A to G. These results now occupy a large part of the first results page.

What does the change mean for your business?

Some businesses have experienced major chances. If they were ranked at the top before they may have slipped down a few places which could result in in a dramatic decrease in enquiries. Businesses that already optimised their Google Places listing succesfully will get a boost.

How can you get a high Google Places listing?

• Setup up your Google Places page. This is the obvious one but many businesses have not yet done so. You can do so by logging into your Google account and click on Google Places.
• Optimise your page for your services and keywords. Make sure that the keyword phrase you want to rank for features in the description of your business and services
• Optimise your own website page and make sure that the address features on the pages
• Make sure to also get your business listed in local directories and get mentions of your business on other relevant and trusted websites

These are only just a few of the factors that Google is believed to take into account. If you like a very comprehensive review of all the factors that can matter then read this extensive survey or just contact us for a consultation on how we can help your business.

Many cannot provide answers to simple questions like:

• How many of these clicks you pay for lead to actual customers?
• Which keywords have the highest conversion rates?
• What is the Return on Investment (ROI) of your ad campaign for particular keywords?
• Which of your ads are performing well?
• Are you measuring goals or conversion rates?

Each month they are provided with a simple report stating how many clicks they got for each keyword and how much they spend.

Getting clicks is easy though!

But do you know how easy it is to get those clicks? All you need to do is to set the budget higher or just let all your ads run on the content network and not on actual searches. Ads on Google search tend to be much more expensive and for a reason. People that search on Google have a specific need or goal for their search. Ads on the content network (these are the ads that get displayed on sites other than Google that discuss topics that relate to your keywords) are usually just clicked on by people browsing a site. So it’s critical to check your conversion rates for particular keywords on regular basis to ensure you are not wasting a lot of your money.

But what exactly is conversion rate?

When you or your ads manager does your ads setup, Google also allows you to assign several goals. These could be:

• Someone made a purchase of your product
• Someone filled in your enquiry or registration form
• Someone subscribed to your newsletter etc.

If someone accomplishes one of these goals, then that is called a conversion. For example:  I search in Google for a beauty facial. I click on one of the ads and after liking what I see, I will fill in the enquiry form to make an appointment. This is a conversion and the reports will show me the exact keyword from which the conversion was made. So a good report will show me that the keyword “beauty facials” had for example a 50% conversion rate. (ie. 50% of all the poeple that found me via the keyword phrase “beauty facial” decided to pursue a particular goal I had setup. I can even give a value to these goals so at the end of the month I can easily calculate how much I spent on all those ads and how much value I got back in return.

So how do I setup my ads then?

You will need to setup your ads in such a way that you can easily measure their effectiveness and adjust them when necessary. Now coming back to what I dicussed earlier: the difference between content targeting and search. It’s very easy to get a lot of clicks from the content targeting network. Many sites (some of which very crappy ones) display these ads and out of interest people may just click on them. However, in my experience content ads for many industries have a very low conversion rate. This means that you are paying for a lot of clicks that actually don’t make you any money at all. (Of course they can be good from a branding prospective).

This is why it does not make any sense to get reports every month just with the number of clicks you had. If you are not measuring your results properly and tracking your ROI, you are probably wasting a lot of your marketing budget.

How can you make sure your ads convert and give a good ROI?

There are a number of things you can do to make sure that you’re not wasting time and money and create ad campaigns that have a high ROI:

1. First you need to do some proper keyword research to ensure you are targeting the right keywords.
2. Then you need to select those keywords that are affordable and are very specific to your market and desired goals(where to get the best facial may be better than what is a facial; the latter would just be looking for information and is not likely to buy).
3. Setup very clear goals with a money value.
4. Create your ads groups and make them very specific to your keywords.
5. Start running the campaign and monitor which keywords and which ads convert well.
6. Then adjust keywords when necessary and elimate the non-performing ones.
7. Carry out some A/B testing for your ads, constantly improving the ad to increase the conversion rate.

Also don’t forget about SEO and good website design

All said and done organic listings in Google (the non sponsored search results) will always convert better than ads. So if you are serious about your online business do not forget about search engine optimisation. In the long term having a well optimised website that is designed to convert visitors into customers will be your most effective marketing tool.

ps. we can manage both your Google ads and your search engine optimisation so contact us if you would like to have more information.

Why do you have a website?

Most businesses will have a website to promote their business online. For many business owners the aim is to provide new leads and generaly generate more business.

So they have a website designer come in and describe to them what they want this site to look like. The designer creates a beautiful image, you like it and it gets turned into a website. The site looks great.

Except… hardly anybody visits it. Sure, you will have the people that go to the site directly because they got your business card or saw your offline advertisement in a magazine somewhere.. But the site cannot be found by anybody else and you are getting very few new leads from your own website.  You may buy advertising in directories or traditional media, as you will feel that the internet does not work in providing leads. Perhaps you will turn to Google adwords and spend lots of money in getting leads but even that (in the wrong heads) gives you a low return on investment.

Don’t blame the internet though..

However, a lot of the time many businesses do not realise that the reason their website presence is not working for them is because they have a poorly created website. Sure, it may look great, but search engines may not like your site at all. What causes that?

• Your site is created in such a way that search engines like Google cannot ‘read’ it. For example the text is not really text but is created as an image or a flash movie.
• The search engines cannot follow any of the links on your site because they were poorly coded. If the search engines cannot even find your pages, how are they supposed to index and rank them?
• Google can read your site and sees all your pages but they have been so poorly labeled that none of these pages gets even a top 50 ranking in their index. Basically, if your site is not on the top page for your keyword phrase you will get very few traffic.
• Google can read your site, see the pages, and has ranked some of your pages but you are not getting top listings because Google considers your site to be of low authority. No-one links to your site and therefore your page has no pagerank.
• Your site does get a few top rankings for a few keyword phrases but since no-one actually searches for that keyword phrase your site still does not get any traffic.
• Your business does not engage with any of the social media on the internet and does not create any online connections or get any linkjuice.

A search engine optimised website and a web strategy can make all the difference!

The Internet can be enormously powerful in providing you with new business and new leads if you use it and interact with it to your advantage. So here is what you can do.

• Learn SEO or search engine optimisation and understand how Google and other search engines rank websites.
• Know what your target customers are looking for. What keywords would they type in the search engines to find you? Make sure you do some thorough keyword research and find those phrases that get some good traffic but are still not that competitive so you can achieve a top ranking.
• Make sure that you make your website search engine friendly.
• If you can’t or don’t want to make changes to your website then start building links or create an alternative (free) search engine friendly website at one of the blogging or networking sites. You can then use that website to drive traffic to your beautiful looking but SEO unfriendly website.
• Create a video or write an article and submit to directories and You Tube. Videos can get a top 10 ranking pretty quickly for your keywords on Google and you can use them as little ads for your business to drive traffic and new customers to your website.
• If you really don’t want to get too much involved with all of this hire an SEO or web strategy consultant and let them take care of it.

When used correctly the Internet can be a very powerful tool to get high quality qualified leads to your business. As the internet becomes more important every day (have you seen the new Apple IPad making it even easier to browse the Internet at any time!) you cannot afford to ignore it.

So how can businesses use Twitter in an effective way?

Twitter is an excellent way to deliver customer service. Even if you don’t use Twitter on a regular basis you can still set up an alert that notifies you whenever someone mentions your brand name or service.

For example: a few months ago I reviewed and tweeted about a software product (Dim Dim) I liked. Almost immediately I received a thank you from someone at Dim Dim, thanking me for the review. It is always be appreciated if someone mentions your product or service in a favourable way and you acknowledge that. It creates a lot of good will.

On the other hand when someone complains about your product or service on Twitter or needs support you could supply that straight away. It could help with avoiding customer dissatisfaction and you can keep updated on what’s happening with anything related to your product or service.

Twitter allows for direct communication between consumer and producer and can really help you with monitoring your company’s reputation. It may be risky for any business to ignore Twitter altogether.

What about facebook?

Facebook is now used in a similar way. Although you can’t setup alerts, you can have your own facebook page. It is quite easy to accumulate some fans through good posts or (inexpensive) advertising. Once you have a reasonable amount of fans interaction takes place on your ‘wall’.

It is very beneficial way to announce new product launches, specials, or interesting facts. Many customers now enter their concerns or enquiries directly on that fan page, as a direct response to your post or just because they were reminded of you while spending time on Facebook. These are customers that you may have otherwise missed if you did not have a presence on Facebook.

Even if you post just 1 new short message every 2 days, you can develop a very active community on Facebook. If you link your posts to your Twitter account, these posts will go out as tweets at the same time.

The bottom line

Setting up a profile on Twitter and Facebook takes fewer effort than you may think and apart from the benefits mentioned above it can also increase your search engine ranking for your business and increase your visibility on the web. So if your business targets consumers Twitter and Facebook are definitely worth considering as part of your web strategy.