Week 1
Getting Started With The Newsletter

Okay, welcome to the first of our Weekly Web Business Newsletters. I want to first of all thank you for registering to receive this newsletter. My core objective of our Weekly Web Business Newsletter is to help educate you on how to build a web business but also educate you on some of the pitfalls of online businesses and businesses in general.

For the last ten years I have been creating and building businesses from scratch. My exploits in business are not only on the web but in the traditional medium as well. All of the businesses I have had to date I have started from scratch and built into profitable enterprises, so much so, I am in the process of selling one of my businesses to build a brand new one. My experience I am going to share with you is based on dual medium experience and one thing I will say to you is that anyone who says the web is totally different to the traditional medium is talking rubbish. I have heard some of the top web guru's say that the principles of the web business do not apply to traditional business.

My response to that is "GARBAGE"!!

I will however admit there are many things that are unique to a web business but those lines are now crossing or becoming much closer as we get to the point where most traditional businesses will service their customers both online and offline. Over the coming weeks I am going to look at some of these issues and things you can do to help both your offline and online businesses.

I want to first though explain how this newsletter will work. Each week I will be providing this newsletter in a text based format. In the weekly newsletter I will have a number of items -

1. An Area of Web Business We Will Study
2. A List of Articles You Can Read That I Have Written During The Week
3. A Case Study of A Website
4. A section to Answer My Clients Questions

Section 4 is specifically set aside for those people who have registered and purchased our new "Online Marketing Business Opportunity" kit which is available at - http://www.YourOnlineMarketingBusinessOpportunity.com

This kit contains a massive amount of information on running your own web business and contains information from people like Corey Rudl, Dan Kennedy, Bob Serling and many many more. Also included in this kit is 12 months of free email support for your web business. Now you can purchase access to this kit by visiting - http://www.YourOnlineMarketingBusinessOpportunity.com and your investment is only $200 USD. This kit we have availalbe will allow you to access each of the individual items for less that what they originally sold for which was $199 USD each which means you are making a massive saving. Plus only those people who have purchased those kits can actually ask questions as part of this newsletter.

Okay, let us look at some fundamentals …

============The Web Business In Focus ================

This week my area of focus will be in identifying what keywords you should be using to build your webpages. Okay, most newbies when they first look at this issue will simply guess what keywords they should be using or they will use to generalised keywords. The result of this is that their sites never rank well.

The number one key tool you should be using to work out what keywords you should be search for is Wordtracker. To access this tool simply goto http://www.wordtracker.com

This tool collates all of the different searches done at the main search engines including -

1. Google.com
2. Yahoo.com
3. MSN.com
4. AllTheWeb.com
5. Altavista.com

In most cases I only worry about the top three search engines. Then the question I hear you saying is who cares. Well, you should here is why.

Most people when they develop their webpages try to go after the really general terms for example, if you are a reseller of Golf products, I have seen these people try to go for general terms Golf, Australia, Golf Club. These keywords are really poor keywords because you will not rank highly for them and you will have to invest millions to even come close to ranking highly and it will take you years. Each of these terms have millions of competing pages as well.

The best types of keywords are ones that are specific. For example, if you were a mobile phone reseller you are better off competing on keywords like -

Townsville Mobile Phone Shop
Nokia N820C Mobile
Erricson DE430

These are specific keywords to certain models and to a location and the reason these are good keywords are that the customers who will search for certain keyterms like this are usually comparing prices of a particular brand from one store to another. The thing about keywords is that you want to bring focused traffic to your online shop. This prinicpal is the same used in normal business.

Let me ask you a question … Would a Retail Dress Shop do very well in an Industrial Park?

The answer is a resounding NO! Why … Because the traffic in an industrial park has focused customers on industrial issues not retail issues. But, it would be acceptable to put an Industrial Uniform Shop in an Industrial Park because the right customers would be available for the Industrial Uniform Shop.

The same principal applies to keywords. We want to bring the most focused traffic to our websites as this traffic is the one that sells. For example … when we started out building Direct Sales Websites, I created a site that sold a Paystub Template in Excel. This template essentially is like a paysheet you get for your employer.

I developed this template in about 30 minutes and put it on my website and I sell it for $2 USD. Now I chose to do this because I found a niche in WordTracker that told me that on the keywords "paystub template" I could expect 30 hits a day with only a handful of competing sites (it certainly is more than that now). I setup the webpage so that we automatically collect payment using Paypal and they can automatically download the product. Now on 30 hits a day, I get a sale for 1 in 5 hits. That is every five people buy and we get around 5 to 10 sales a day simply because we get more than what Wordtracker predicted. Five to ten sales at $2 USD each might not seem like much but imagine if you found another 200 small niche products like that, you would be earning $4000 USD a day multiply that by 365 days a year, that is a massive 1.45 million dollars a year you would be earning and that would be pure profit. Remember, I said everything we did was totally automated. Pretty cool huh!

You can see why I invest in knowing what keywords people are using so that I can find where the niche markets are and then build my products around the needs of those clients.

I will say that wordtracker is only one tool that I use to find out what keywords people are using, some of the other tools include things like -

- Google News Groups
- MySpace Websites
- Blogs
- Search Engines
- Overture
- Google Adwords etc

However, the number one tool you must invest in, is definitely a subscription to Wordtracker.

http://www.wordtracker.com

============= This Weeks Articles For Your Review ==========

1. Four Warning Signs Every Website Owner Should Listen For When Trying To Hire an SEO Strategist

2. Top 4 Key Issues You Need to Consider When Choosing Your Domain

3.Top 5 On-Page Search Engine Optimisation Strategies

============ Case Study - North Haven Homes =============

North Haven Homes is one of our clients we are working with to help build a successful website and get more local enquiries. At the moment they do not rank well for the most common local terms. Their original website at - http://www.northhavenhomes.com.au does not have a number of key elements which we are going to correct and get them ranking well.

The first keywords we want to target to rank in the top ten spot for Google.com and Google.com.au are

- Townsville Home Builder
- Townsville Construction Company

If you look at the website - http://www.northhavenhomes.com.au there are virtually no meta tags or keywords used in the main website page to reflect these keywords. When you are trying to build a site you must include your keywords in the following areas -

a) Title Meta Tag
b) Meta Tags (Including the Description and the Keywords)
c) Alt tags on pictures
d) Keywords in the articles
e) Use the H1 tag around the page title.

To find out what keywords are being used in a site we simply right mouse click over the page and choose View Source.

At the moment we do not have full control of the NorthHavenHomes.com.au site but we have control of a sister site at http://www.northhavenhomes.com . You will notice that I have used four of the five on page optimisation techniques. I expect within 2-3 weeks NorthHavenHomes.com website will rank in the top ten for the keywords above.

We will come back and revisit it at this time.

================== Your Questions ==================

1. How long does it take for a new domain to be listed in Google?

This question is in fact a tough one. There are companies on the Internet that purport to be able to get your website listed in the Google index in just 2 days. Now Google says that no company can actually offer such a guarantee however it is actually possible to do it.

Essentially there are two key things you need to do to get listed quickly …

- Add a Google Sitemap to your website
- Get a Backlink from a PR7 or higher website

A Google Sitemap as far as I am concerned is one of those elements that is mandatory in getting your website listed quickly. For example, I have been working recently on a website called Asthma Signs and Symptoms and the web address is http://www.AsthmaSignsandSymptoms.biz and was list in the index in just 4 days. We achieved this by adding a sitemap to the site and then submitting an article to a number of Article Directories including -

- www.ezinearticles.com
- www.searchwarp.com

Both of which are PR 7 or higher sites. However, being included in the index is different to being ranked highly for competitive keywords and this is where the questions get very grey. There is an area or aspect of Google called the Google Sandbox which is supposed to keep brand new websites from ranking highly. Now I do not know whether this is true or not but the "Asthma Signs and Symptoms" site when it was added, joined the index as 270 for that keyword.

However, another website I helped my client setup which is www.AdvancedWealthPlanningTechniques.com ranked in Google, once included in the third position for the keywords "Advanced Wealth Planning Techniques". The site was added to the index in about 2 weeks but then ranked really high for these competitive words so I do have some questions regarding the Google Sandbox.

2. How did you get the "Advanced Wealth Planning Techniques" site to rank so well so quickly?

The key to this was the on-page Search Engine Optimisation techniques. Essentially we covered off the basics such as using the keywords in the -

a) Title Meta Tag
b) Meta Tags (Including the Description and the Keywords)
c) Alt tags on pictures
d) Keywords in the articles
e) Use the H1 tag around the page title.

We also ensured we wrote submitted at least three articles to the article directories and ensured in the HYPERTEXT part of the links back to our site that we also included the keywords.