Search Engine Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) For Omaha, Nebraska

The Cubicle Life is NOT for me!

August 5th 2008 Posted at Work From Home
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As I write this, I am sitting in one of my favorite coffee shops, within earshot of 2 middle level mangers from a major corporation. (I know this by their professionally embroidered polos!) Their conversation consists of how their employees are resisting the 360 reviews and ‘self assessments’ – folks, THIS I do not miss. And this is why I want to make the coffee shop my only ‘cubicle’! These managers banter about ‘Emotional intelligence’ and other corporate HR buzzwords is not a part of my lifestyle.

Working for myself, from home, or where ever a client wants to meet me is the single highest priority – I get to spend some decent time with my kids, set my own hours(although I tend to be a work-a-holic and put in way too many hours anyway.) I am Employee of the month every month and have garage parking!

Anyway, this is just kind of a rant since I can hear the crazy-talk that I have worked so hard for 5 years to avoid.

Have Fun out there! SEM

Picking a great domain name

August 2nd 2008 Posted at Marketing Your Site
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Picking a domain name is quite possibly one of the most important things you can do when you are starting up a site, and possibly one of the most difficult. Difficult, because many, many domains have already been registered. Here are some tips:
1. When you are researching, it is fairly important to have a keyword in your name – for instance if you are selling jewelry, you should have the word jewelry somewhere in the name.

2. Don’t make it too regional if you are thinking of a national or international audience – in the case of jewelry sales in Houston, JewelryDesignHouston.com would not be a good name if you were trying to appeal to a larger audience than the residents of Houston.

3. Unless you are a non-profit organization or a college or university, try to stick with the .com extension – no one can remember the other extensions, like .biz too easily.

4. Stay away from special characters and numbers in your name. Dashes and the numbers 0-9 don’t make for names that are easily remembered.

In general, practice trying to tell someone the name out loud or over the phone if you can say it without having to explain it that is best, for example, we’ll use 4example.com – “hello Bill, my domain is w w w . 4 the number 4 not spelled out example . com.” This makes for a very confused individual on the other end of the phone.

You can go to any domain registrar to find out if your name is available – if it is not, sites like Premium Domain Name Auctions should have a great selection of names, or people willing to sell you your dream domain name.

Practice what I preach

July 28th 2008 Posted at Content Development, Work From Home
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Most of my clients ask me what the best way is to get traffic to their site at some point or another. For some, I know blogging will do them a great deal of good. I recommend that they 1. Start a blog and 2. Post diligently in their blog 3-5 times a week. Now, if you will notice, it has been seemingly quite a while since my last post…almost a week. Yikes! Here I am telling people what they need to do and not practicing it.

So, a friend of mine from CGMTechnologies.com, who has many similar ideas came up with something that I am going to try to do – maybe it is second nature to most, but for me it is going to take some discipline. Chris has proposed a 30 day challenge to set aside a certain amount of time daily towards the goal of becoming financially successful on the web(a different definition for everyone – to some this may be a little extra cash, while to others, it may be a part time job or even full time). You will read more on this in the coming weeks as Chris defines the parameters of the challenge.

In the mean time – -Get out and blog your behind off! SEM

Blogging For Dollars

July 22nd 2008 Posted at Traffic Building
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Today’s topic covers a couple of different ways to monetize a business. I have often said that there is a pretty straightforward formula for turning your website into a revenue stream – this being: Content = Traffic = Money. In that order. Content needs to be placed in order for search engines to get ahold of it, so that they can display the site for people who are searching. Simple concept in theory, and most site owners don’t get it. They expect the “if you build it they will come” theory to be true, (which can happen, but it’s like winning the lottery). You must have content, content, content. This will get you traffic naturally.

The other thing you really need is backlinks. Even more difficult than building content – this is where some of the other techniques come into play – forum posting, article submission, comment posting on blogs…all good ways to get backlinks.

Ok…kind of a scatterbrained post for today, but I have had 3 questions this morning about this very subject, so it may be more out of frustration than anything! Thanks!

Blog Commenting to drive traffic

July 18th 2008 Posted at Traffic Building
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One way to drive traffic to your site or blog is to get on the web and find blogs that have similar content to your site or blog, and leave a few posts with relevant content. If your site has content on real estate loans, for instance, find a blog about real estate investing and leave a comment on a few key posts, with real, relevant information. This provides you with key backlinks to your site as well as links that users who are curious about your site and found your comments useful will follow.

It is not too difficult to find blogs related to your content – just go to blogcatalog.com or bloghub.com to find relevant blogs. Then find a few that you like, and post comments…bloggers appreciate feedback on their post anyway…this provides valuable content and interaction with the blogger. And, who knows, you may end up meeting someone you like and form a valuable business relationship with!
Happy Commenting!

Ebay Partner Network – Build A Niche Store

July 16th 2008 Posted at Ebay Partner Marketing, Work From Home
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One way to monetize your blogs, sites or other online media is to promote items from other websites. For instance, Ebay has a nice affiliate program called the ebaypartnernetwork.com. You get some very nice kickbacks for promoting ebay, including 5% of the total listing fees, and $25 when someone signs up for a new account with ebay. The types of sites you can promote stuff on are only limited by the types of things sold on ebay. I personally like light, high value items that many people search for on ebay, and then I build a website around that niche using either Build A Niche Store or wordpress. I also try to find a niche that I can write a series of articles about so that I can do some ezinearticle.com submissions. This method usually helps to move my site up in the Google natural listings to help with the organic traffic. Next, I try to add some unique content to the site itself – tying into the articles I submit. Once the content is in place, I like to make sure that I get the site listed, so I choose a few select directories to list it in.

Now, one other thing I do to jumpstart things is a carefully worded ad on craigslist. This will get some hits right away for you. It takes a few hits to get things going, and a week or more to see some income. My most recent success was a niche clothing site. I put several ads on craigslist, and nothing more. In a week I had my first commissions – 3 sales worth $3 and one ebay signup netted me $25. This was with 51 targeted hits!

If you would like more information on the ebay partner network or Build A Niche Store please contact me. Build A Niche Store recommends the hosting from HostGator, and I have found that they do work the best for hosting BANS.

Drop Shipping as a home business

July 11th 2008 Posted at Work From Home
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Drop shipping is a fairly simple concept, but often difficult to pull together. The concept is that you would build an ecommerce website, load the cart up with all of your suppliers’ items, and you are open for business. Someone places an order on the site, pays for it, and the shipping via credit card. You get confirmation that someone has placed an order on your site, usually via e-mail. Once you have confirmed that the payment was actually received, you would go to your supplier, and place the order on your customer’s behalf. You pay the supplier the wholesale cost, and usually a small handling fee (after all, the supplier is warehousing the items for you), and you keep the difference between that and what the customer paid. The supplier usually has the ability to place your logo or store name on the invoice along with your contact information, so it looks just like it came from you to the customer.

This is a great business model for a home business because there is no inventory to keep track of. My 10 year old daughter can update the cart on our dropshipping t-shirt business – WalkingTestimony.com with no trouble at all.
The site is powered by a shopping cart produced by ecommercetemplates.com that I have found to be exceptional both in performance and the service when trying to troubleshoot a problem within the cart. It is really flexible for couponing and other nice features. More on the cart later – back to the subject at hand.

One of the drawbacks to drop shipping can sometimes be the return process. What I do is get the returns myself, and then instead of sending them back to the company, I use them, give them away as a promo, or sell them on ebay.

The biggest difficulty I have found is getting the word out about the products, and promoting the site…traffic is never easy to come by, and that is where you will find yourself spending the most time.

This is kind of a crash course in the drop shipping concept, but it can be profitable, challenging and rewarding all at the same time.

Domain Parking For Cash

July 5th 2008 Posted at Uncategorized
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How many times have you asked yourself, “what can I do with all of these domains lying around doing nothing but costing me money?” I do all the time, and I finally found an answer of sorts…many registrars like godaddy offer some sort of domain parking solutions – I found one that is better! WhyPark.com is a site where you can park your domains (up to 100 of them) and set up keyword targeted pages for each domain.

I am always at a loss for what to do with these domains that I want to keep, but don’t want to spend a huge amount of time developing, Whypark.com makes it easy. I will be posting more info here when I see how the earnings stack up. One nice thing is that you get to keep 100% of the earnings from your site.

Article Submission For Traffic

July 3rd 2008 Posted at Content Development, Marketing Your Site
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Often, I will recommend article submission as a way for my clients to send traffic to their web site. A couple of well written articles can provide you with great backlinks and some traffic directly from the article site. The basic premise behind this is that someone who wants the content that you have written will copy it, leaving the link to your site intact (per the terms of the site you submitted your article to). This places your link on other sites of like content, which is helpful in the Search Engine Optimization process. This is a win/win situation for both sites…you get backlinks, and they get content.

Several sites that provide submission services are available and they are usually free. I like ezinearticles.com – they seem to be the highest quality, and all articles are human reviewed before releasing them to be read by the public.

Don’t forget that you should re-write the article if you are submitting to more than one service, or taking it from your blog.

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Search Engine Marketing For the Masses