14 Things Would-Be Marketers Should Know
ByThis is a long post, but I think it is important to brush up on the basics once in a while. Take 5 minutes to read this long mail and you may very well find some areas which need tweaking with your online efforts.
1. Do not invest much money in your first site. This is the great thing about the Internet! There is little downside and the rewards can be almost unlimited. If you can’t make money on a low cost start-up, you won’t make any money no matter how much you spend on the site…advertising etc. I started Cactus Canyon with a $3.95 per month hosting account and one case of product I bought for $200! There is not another business opportunity ANYWHERE with such low risk and high reward possibilities than an online business.
2. Google’s ranking criteria consists of over 200 different variables. Relevant and optimized content and the number of incoming, one-way links from relevant sites are at the top of the list.
3. If you have someone else design and build your site, your first question to them is do they have a good working knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet marketing in general. If they don’t have a clue, find someone else. Better yet, learn to design your site yourself. In my opinion, your chances of success are slim to none if you don’t learn how to create and modify your site yourself. It is not rocket science. Take the time to learn it if you are serious about making money on the Internet.
4. The more pages of content the better. Set yourself some goals for content. Imagine if you create one new page per day. In a year the site will have 365 pages of great content! This content should attract a lot of traffic! Even if your goal was only 2 pages per week, you would still have over 100 pages in a year!
5. Write your content page AFTER you have determined the exact keyword phrase you are going to use and then optimize with it. Never write content simply for the sake of writing content. Always use keyword tools to help you write content which people are actually searching for.
6. Remember that keyword phrases 3 and 4 words long are MUCH easier to rank for. Although there are many more searches for “dogs” than “dog training tips”, it will be far easier to get traffic to the page optimized with the longer phrase. PLUS the people who search for and find your “dog training tips” page will be interested in EXACTLY what your page is about.
7. Think NICHE! The Internet is HUGE, and so is the competition! But no matter what the area is, there are enough niche areas within it to generate a LOT of traffic and profits.
8. Keep your site’s theme narrow. Google LOVES themes! In other words, for a dog site, focusing on a narrow theme will make it more attractive to Google. All things being equal, a hundred page site about dogs in general will have less respect from Google than a 100 page site about dog training. Keep your site focused!
9. NEVER pay money to a company to “Get your site submitted to hundreds of search engines”. This is a COMPLETE waste of money.
10. NEVER sign up with a company which promises 100’s of incoming links! Remember that saying “If it sounds too good to be true, it is”. AND it could get your site banned if Google thinks you are personally participating in link spamming! There are no free lunches in Internet Marketing. Before you ever pay money for any type of listing or linking service, PLEASE write to me and let us talk about it first! Don’t end up shooting yourself in the foot!
11. Be careful about spending money for even “legitimate” links. There are many great sites with high page rank which will place a one-way link to your page from theirs for twenty-five to fifty dollars. As you may know, having a link to your site from a site with a page rank of five or six and with the same theme is a VERY good deal for your site. Google will give your site bonus points for a link like that. However, Matt Cutts with Google has stated that Google minimizes the importance of the link if they detect it is paid link. And as I said earlier, the Google spiders are VERY smart.
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13. You can submit your site directly to Google and Yahoo if you wish, but the search engines will give your page more relevance if they find its link in some other way; like at the directories which you submitted to. I never bother submitting directly to Google or Yahoo anymore. Besides, when Google sees links to it from another site, they will give my new site more relevance.
14. Do not spend your time or money on pay-per-click advertising like Google AdWords until you have traffic and sales coming from regular, “organic” searches. The learning curve is high for pay-per-click success. Your time and money should be spent learning basic search engine marketing. Remember, search engine optimization, both on and off page SEO,will be your most effective marketing strategy.
Great Post Steve, I agree with all your points.
Pls, do you think is Okay to submit the same articles on my site to Article directories after it has been indexed by Google.
Yes, after you are sure your page is indexed in Google, you can submit that article to the article directories….no harm in that and it does help get your link out there. Of course original content is best, but let’s re-purpose the existing content as much as possible. Some people think they will get their site penalized for that….it’s not true though.