To your online success

Finding your niche

Hey everyone, sorry about the lack of updates during easter. I´m now back from the vacation and will update regularly again.

When you decide to start working on the internet you should sit down and think about what you would like to work with. The Internet is a place full of different products and services and you can find pretty much anything you want to work with. But in order to find something to work with you need to know what you are looking for.

When I stared working online I tried to go into a field that I knew nothing about. Sounds silly doesn’t it. And it was. I was swept away with the idea of how much money was actually in circulation in the market I wanted to break into. I thought that if there´s that much money going around it should be easy to grab a piece of it. Guess if I was wrong.

I knew nothing about the thing that I tried to promote which meant I knew nothing about the people I tried to sell products to. Knowing your potential customers is a key in all business and the internet marketing business is no different. I thought that I could be very general and get people to be interested in the product I tried to sell. Again, a product I knew nothing about since I didn’t really understand what it would do for the customer.

The point of the above rant is that you need to know who you are trying to sell things to in order to know what your customer needs. We can try to sell people the best product in the world, but if we don’t know what problem it solves for our customers, we can never convince them to buy the product. Which makes sense. If you go into a car dealer and the sales person tries to sell you a van when you’re actually looking for a sports car, the chance is slim that you get even a little interested in what he has to say.

My suggestion is to pick something that you are interested in when you are starting up. It doesn’t matter if you write articles, blog or make landing pages for PPC search engines, if you know what you’re talking about you can better sell the products. Worth mentioning is that most niches have smaller niches within them and only someone who are really interested in the topic might know about these micro niches. Knowing these things will make it easier to sell things too since you can talk about how the product solves exactly this particular problem for people.

After my first failure at just picking a random area to work with, I actually did pick something I’m interested in. It’s been my hobby for a few years now and I know what I’m talking about in this field which makes the material I write seem a bit more convincing. So, what you decide to work with is really up to what kind of person you are but it could be basically anything you are interested in and know a good deal about. Hobbies, sports, work related things - there are a lot of options. Find the niche you want to work with and then find a product or products that you think would help the people you want as customers. Most often it´s people with an interest for the same thing as you, so you know how to talk to them.

If you can’t think of anything that you would like to work with or there are simply no products that you think would sell you might have to learn a new thing. Pick something you would like to know more about and start reading about this subject, become an expert in what you want to do and you will have better results.

Do you have suggestions for other ways to find niches to work with, please post your thoughts.

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Promoting with social networking sites

Hey everyone! First off, I´m sorry I didn’t write as much this week as before. I´m currently on easter vacations and I didn’t have as much opportunity to get to the computer as I thought I would.

That said, I hope the people who have already started their easter holidays are having a good and relaxing time and happy holidays to you and yours.

This article will cover some basic ideas about using social networking sites to promote your business. Social networking sites have been around for quite some times but they have just gained more popularity over the recent years with a few of the most well known being FaceBook and MySpace.

If you are not familiar with a social networking site is, I will quickly explain it here. Simply put these sites are designed for friends to keep in touch or so that people can find new friends of similar interests. When you sign up for the sites, you get a personal profile page where you can post a profile picture and some descriptions about you as well as list interests and such. The profile page can be customized and you can make it really personal. How much the profile can be customized vary on each of the sites.

I mentioned MySpace and FaceBook before since I know that both these sites allow business profile pages. And even though it´s not necessary to turn your profile page into a sales page, it can be very useful depending on what you are selling or promoting. I’ve seen people who just use their profile pages to socialize and they talk about the product to their friends and drive traffic to their sales pages that way.

Both of the techniques work and what you decide to go with is really up to you. Maybe you already have a FaceBook and MySpace page but you just didn’t use it for this before. However you decide to use these sites, remember to read and follow their rules since each sites rules are different.

What you also should do is to use several social networking sites. You can easily use Wikipedia to find a list of a bunch of networking sites to get you started. Apart from the ones I’ve mentioned here (facebook.com and myspace.com) I will also mention Yuwie, since Yuwie is a social networking site with all the regular features, but with the added perk of getting payed to use it. Because of this feature, Yuwie seems to attract a lot of people working online or being interested in working online, which might give you a pre-targeted market already (again, depending on what you’re promoting).

When you’ve signed up for a number of social bookmarking sites it´s time to start designing your profile. Make your profile eye catching and nice looking, don’t just plaster your profile with banners and links to the things you are promoting because that will just make it look bad and not very personal. Try to make the profile page sell by showing how the product helped you, if possible. And use the social networking sites for what they are, make friends.

Apart from being a good source of possible customers or such, you can also make good connections to people who work online and you might find new friends to learn from and share ideas with. And as a bonus, the social networking sites are also quite fun.

I will try to get more posts up during the easter holidays, but I will not promise anything. So, if I don’t find the time… Happy Easter!

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What is SEO

Something that you hear over and over when you are looking for information about internet marketing and making money online is SEO, and it´s likely that you have figured out what it is, but it´s still probably not very well explained. I will try to explain a little bit about it here.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization in short means to make your website more attractive to search engines. This is done by a number of ways and I will mention the very basic things in this article.

A search engine and a person doesn’t exactly see the webpages the same way and there are things on the page that are supposed to only be read by the engines, one of these things are the meta tags. In the meta tags you can put things like keywords and description.

First off all you need to research what keywords are relevant to your site, but seeing as you started the site up already, you probably have quite a good idea about this. If you haven’t started the site yet and you are intending to make a site about a niche, just with the intention of making money, research will be good. And if this is the case, you might want to look into how possible it is to get a domain name that have the keywords in it. Keyword rich domain names will help your listings on certain search engines since extra weight might be put into the fact that the things people search for show in your domain name.

When you optimize your site for search engines you want to make sure you use the keywords in your title tag, the meta tags, possible image alt tags and of course in the content of the page itself. However, don’t overdo this. Trying to build pages only for search engines and not for people will most often just hurt you in the long run. I believe it is John Chow who once wrote that he always puts people first and Google second. To me, this makes a lot of sense. It´s the visitors who should come first and then the search engines.

That said though, you should always make sure you have your most important keywords mentioned here and there on the site.

If you are a blogger and you are able to install plugins on your blog, I would like to take the moment to suggest a plugin called All in one SEO. With this plugin you can edit the title of each post as well as add keywords and descriptions to the posts.

Did I forget any of the basic SEO stuff, feel free to add your thoughts.

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Sticking to the plan

I know I nag about the whole motivational part quite often, but it´s just because it´s a really important part. Being clear on why you do what you do and how to get there are some of the more important things with running your own company.

You have decided to start you own online business and you are excited about working from home. That´s great, making a decision is the very first step to anything.

When you decided to start your company, did you also make a plan how to go about with your start and with your work?

Even though making the decision is a big step, it will be just that if you don’t have a plan. And you can’t stand on one foot for too long. The plan is the path you lay out in front of you so you know where to put the other foot.

My suggestion is that you first of all decide how much time you can invest into the company. Make a schedule for your daily, weekly or monthly time investment and stick to it. Working from home takes a lot of discipline since you don’t have anyone standing over you shoulder to see if you are doing the things you are supposed to do. And you will be surprised how many distractions you can find in your own home if things are a bit slow one day.

Don’t get distracted would be the next logical thing to say. No matter what the distractions are, they are a form of procrastination. You go do ”just take care of this little thing” and all of a sudden you have found yourself doing five other ”little things”. When you sit down to work with your company, work. Don’t let little things get in the way and work the hours you have set aside.

The next suggestion I have when you start up a business is to do research. No matter what kind of business you are starting you should research. This becomes more important if you are going to work with affiliate marketing and promoting a product you are not 100% familiar with. Research, research and research. You want to become an expert on the product you are promoting. Or better yet, you should become an expert on the problem this product solves.

People who are looking to buy products or services do so to fill a need. If you know what problems or issues the might have, and why they want this product, you will be much more convincing in promoting it.

I mention this in a lot of articles I write. Goals. Set goals for yourself. If you have a plan but you don’t have a goal, you don’t know what you are working for. Be sure you know why you are doing what you are doing and what you want to achieve. If you are working to be able to buy your dream house, then get a picture of your dream house and hang on the wall so it serves as a constant reminder of why you are doing what you are. It will help you on days when things feels really slow.

Doing these three things will help you be closer to success in what you do, no matter what kind of business it is.

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Backlinks matters

In some previous posts I talk about backlinks and I figure it´s a good time to talk a little bit more about what backlinks do for your site and traffic.

The concept of building backlinks is simply to get links that are pointing back to your site. This can be done in a number of ways and I will explain some of the most common ways and why you should make an effort in building links.

So, why should you build links back to your site. Well, the first answer would be that they can give you traffic back, people will see the links and click on them. But also the people you trade links with might find your site interesting enough to come back to. Getting your links out there will start the word of mouth or viral marketing a bit too. People notice your site and will start talking about it, which in itself will bring more people to your site.

Of course there are more things behind the reason to build backlinks. Search engines. It used to be that you got a good domain name and added some relevant search words to your title and meta tags, then put it a few times on the site itself and voila! AltaVista came to eat your site up and you got a placement in the top three links on your term. Obviously, that doesn’t happen anymore.

The search engines have become a little bit more complex than that (even if that was quite complex to figure out back then too). One of the things that add to the complexity of the search engines is popularity. The way search engines, and perhaps Google more than any other, is by looking at what sites link back to yours.

This does not mean that more links is better even if it might seem so at first. What you want to do is trade links with sites relevant to your topic and you want to trade links with real sites. If you try to submit your site to link farms you might end up getting penalized by the search engines.

Search engines see it as your site being more popular if popular sites link to you. Or in other words, if more popular sites link to yours, it will be seen as a link that weights heavier on the search engines ranking of your site.

To get started with the building of backlinks go out and search for sites that you like and find would bring value to your readers too, e-mail the webmaster and suggest a link trade. But, don’t get too carried away. You don’t want to turn your site into a linkfarm itself. No one will want to trade with a site that links to a billion other sites.

Apart from the old fashioned link trading described above remember the social bookmarking sites. These sites usually have very good popularity themselves and you can get your links up there without having to link back to their sites. This form of links will give you even more popularity with the engines since they don’t see it as a link trade but as people just linking to your site because it´s that good. There are a ton of social bookmarking sites out there, so you have a lot of work.

Something that is very powerful is to use forums to build backlinks. And no, I´m not talking about spamming forums here, that´s always a big no no. Find forums relevant to your topic. If you don’t feel comfortable diving into discussions right away then follow the forums for a while before you make your first post. This is generally a good idea even if you are familiar with the topic, just to get a feel for how the discussions usually go. When you do make your first post you simply have a link back to your site in your signature file.

Most forums are very strict about posting pure links in their forums but having a link to your site in the signature is a common and accepted way to get your site noticed without being pushy about it.

The last thing I will mention for building backlinks is directories. Directories are like search engines but the listings are checked by real people. If your link is accepted it will be listed without you needing to link back to their site, so again, it´s the better kind of links.

As a last addition I will just mention this, stay away from automated ways of getting your link submitted to a number of sites. It usually end up hurting more than helping.

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