Introduction
Introduction

Creating a Business Plan

Facts About an Online Business

Registering A Business

email addresses and Domain Names

Merchant Accounts

Five Steps to making money Online

Advertising on the Internet

Sample Documents

Business Plan guide and Template

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Five Steps to Making Money Online

Construct and Launch Your Online Business.
At this stage you should have:

• a registered business,

• dial up account • email account

• domain name.

Now you need to refine online business strategies and construction of the website. Lets step back and examine what you are doing. In simple terms you are establishing an internet presence. Establishing an internet presence involves presenting some of your own information on the Internet. This is typically done by developing one or more "web pages". You can use your web pages to convey information about your business, what it sells, and contact and sales information. By registering your web pages with Internet search engines, people all over the world can find your web pages when they are searching for the types of things your business offers.

You are most probably using ezimerchant to construct your website. ezimerchant removes most of the construction effort and allows you to focus on equally important tasks such as the collation of the content. For those importing data from another data source please refer to the relevant references in the ezimerchant manual. Regardless of your information source you need good product descriptions and images to produce a meaningful website. Collate these into one location for easy management and keep good backups!! Boy, you should be hot to trot now. You have a registered business name, domain name, web space, dialup, merchant account and all your content and product data ready to go. Time now to build your website. Please refer to the ezimerchant manual to take you through this process. Also read forward in this document as you construct the site. The content (Text) that you place on the home, category and product pages can help secure your site a better ranking with the search engines.

Five Steps to Online Success For Small and Medium Business
After building and uploading your new website you have finally arrived at the starters gate! That’s right. Its only the beginning of your new venture. What you have is a great store without any customers. Now its time to attract customers, keep them and make some money. It is at this point we utilise all the knowledge we can resource to make your start successful. With more online sales operations than any other company in Australia we have the unique advantage of having helped more people in this space than any other provider. As a result we have greater hands on experience, watching and helping these businesses for over five years. We know what works and does not. We have clearly identified the online roadmap to success.

Take these steps and Succeed! It works!
1. Establish your product in a niche or vertical market. If you are planning or already have product we show you how to pick and/or position your product to SELL!
2. Develop a unique selling proposition that can make you succeed in markets others fail in.
3. Get Found on the Internet. We show you how. Watch while thousands of people visit your website.
4. Manage your customer/email list. We show you how to build, manage and make money from an email list.
5. Be patient and budget 6-18months. It can happen relatively quickly.. But be prepared to wait.
 

Step 1: Establish your product in a niche or vertical market.
If you already have product in a competitive market and you are not yet getting any results maybe you need to specialise. The biggest mistake many companies make is trying to be everything to everybody. Find an obvious void in the marketplace and fill it! Adjust your company or product to meet a specific need and then specialize! We will give you some examples.

A niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a market frequently not addressed by mainstream providers.

Why should you bother to establish a niche market? Because of the great advantage of being alone there; other small businesses may not be aware of your particular niche market, and large businesses won’t want to bother with it.

The trick to capitalising on a niche market is to find or develop a market niche that has customers who are accessible, that is growing fast enough, and that is not owned by one established vendor already.
The biggest mistake an online business can make is being everything to everyone. Look at the Pet category. Why bother competing with pets.com when you could focus on and attract every parakeet owner in the world with parakeets.com (Interestingly, this has been taken as a domain but not used!)
 

The truth is, running two or three web sites that each target a specific niche market is the EASIEST WAY TO MAKE MONEY on the Internet. Everyone is looking for the big money maker. So, all too often, niche markets are ignored. We have merchants that operate over 30 separate online stores each. And guess what? They are still adding new ones!
So the objective then is to:
• Find a niche market.
• Figure out what they want.
• Develop the product.
• Offer it to them.
• Automate the business.
• Then start another and diversify.

There is a lot of money to be made this way. Focusing on a distinct, well-defined niche market is a powerful key to online success. A unique niche reduces competition and provides your online business with a clearly- defined market.
 

Bookstores on the internet are common – many, like Amazon.com, already dominate a major online consumer share. However, focusing on a niche means you can isolate and spotlight a single book category - a specialised discipline - and exploit the exclusivity and uniqueness of that vertical market.
What happens when you move into a niche market and specialise? First, you immediately turn a commodity into an oddity - a unique, differentiated product with a defined target demographic. Instead of just ‘books’, you now become the online authority for, say, ‘dieting books’ - with a defined audience and clear picture on where that audience gravitates. (health news groups, body and fitness related sites and portals, weight loss ezines, content sites, newsletters, and so forth). Also, you are now a manager and supplier of rare or specialty products that may be difficult to locate offline through traditional brick-and-mortar outlets.

With a specialised product, your broad-spectrum competition is no longer directly competing for your target market - and having ‘the lowest price’ is less of an issue. Understanding what makes your customers tick because you know exactly who they are and what they want, also enables you to communicate with them in a way they will respond to.

Regardless of whatever marketing technique you employ, you’ve already leveraged your opportunities for generating meaningful traffic by narrowing in on a qualitatively distinct audience with predictable consumer needs.

In a niche market, you can achieve higher search rankings by optimising URL’s, titles, tags and content with the niche keywords unique to your business. With your keyword competition greatly reduced, your customers will have no difficulty finding you at the top of search queries.
The bottom line question is this: can your business sell more by specialising, differentiating, and locking onto various niche markets? However, beware, concentrating too closely on an isolated niche can also be a liability if the market for your product is quite small or there is little online demand for such a limited item. This is what a business plan and market analysis is for.
Once you have discovered a lucrative niche market, you can build around a core product vertically - and enhance overall value.

Does Your Website Target a Particular Market?
Well, does it? Is it geographic or demographic? Male or female, young or old? Business or consumer?
With a little planning, you can determine exactly who visits your site and who doesn’t. you achieve this by using search terms throughout your site that are geared specifically towards your own niche markets.

If you are not sure follow us through this process. Write down the specific markets your products and services are aimed at and then drill down even further. Do you service only one state, country or city? Are you mainly targeting men in their thirties, parents of young children or teenage girls?
Lets use this example; a fictional florist located in Sydney who specialises in wedding bouquets. Their target markets would probably be:
• women in their early to late twenties
• people living in Sydney and surrounding suburbs
• brides-to-be living in Sydney and surrounding suburbs
• dating males
• couples (especially around Valentine’s Day)

There are probably more potential markets than this but this will do for the moment. Now we have narrowed down our target market, lets get inside their heads.
Lets say you were a mum helping with your daughters wedding preparation, what would YOU type in to the search engines to find the goods and services offered on your own site?
Write down these search terms as they come to mind. Using our florist example again, relevant search terms could include:
• Flowers
• Weddings
• wedding flowers
• roses
• bouquets
• florists
• gifts

Having defined these add qualifying terms that will help define your market even more. Choose terms that are relevant to your geographic region, or specific product / service offering. Unless our fictional Sydney florist sends flowers outside of Sydney, they wouldn’t want to attract any web site visitors from outside the city right? Also, if somebody searches the web looking for flower fertilizer, our Sydney florist wouldn’t want them visiting either.

Adding qualifying terms reduces the likelihood of these visitors. For example, let’s add the following terms to our original list:
• Send, deliver, flowers Sydney
• Send wedding flowers, NSW
• Wedding bouquets, Sydney
• Sydney, roses for weddings
• rose bouquets, Sydney.
• Florists, Sydney

A few selective terms can narrow down the searches considerably. Your visitors will arrive at your site already highly qualified. Now you have narrowed down your search terms to reach your markets, scatter these search terms throughout your web pages.

Replace keywords in your existing tags with your new target terms and use the most important ones within your URL is possible, title tag and description. If you’re not confident enough to do this yourself, give the terms to your web designer or a SEO and ask them to do it.
Once you’ve dominated one niche market with this strategy, you can start to expand your focus… or go after a completely different niche.

Step 2. Your Unique Selling Proposition.
What is a USP or Unique Selling Proposition
The USP is your single, most marketable and competitive edge is and why people should buy from you instead of someone else. Most businesses don't have a USP, only a "me too," vague, unexciting presence that just feeds off the sheer momentum of the marketplace. There's nothing unique or distinct. They promise no great value, benefit, or service -- just "buy from us" for no justifiable, rational reason.

Would you bother buying from a business that's just "there," with no unique benefit, no great prices, selection, service or guarantee? Or would you prefer a business that offers you the greatest selection in the country or one with every product discounted to less than what competitors charge or one that sells just top of the shelf products with the same quality guarantee of service.
The reality is your visitors don't give a hoot about you, your product, or how hard you have worked to make it available. The simple fact is, they don't think about you at all. They have only one question when they hit your site: What's in this for me? You have only seconds in which to provide an appropriate answer. Talk of you, your company, or your product, regardless of uniqueness, will only bring a click on the Back button. Soul-searched words about the benefits your company or product offers will also bring immediate exit.

Without carefully creating a clear, strong and appealing USP you will lose potential customers.
Coming up with a Killer USP. Can’t think of a good USP for your business. Don’t worry, the possibilities for USP’s are endless. It's best, however, to adopt a USP that addresses an obvious void in the marketplace that you can fill.

The objective is to focus on the one niche, need or gap that is most sorely lacking, provided you can keep the promise you make. After defining your USP, make sure it is included in every written communication to clients, on every advertisement, newsletter, invoice, brochure and business card. Naturally, clearly spelled out on your website.

The USP is something you can build your business around and can lead you to success, and wealth, so you better be able to state it. If you can't, your prospects won't see it or understand it. Whenever a potential customer of yours needs the type of product or service you sell, your USP should bring your business immediately to mind.

Creating Your USP
Write down one-paragraph statement of your new USP. Remember this is your single most competitive edge that differentiates you from the rest and gives you a market edge. When I say single, I mean single statement. It is one or more reasons why prospects should work with you, or buy from you, or do business with you, instead of your competitors, period. The USP might incorporate two core elements such as ‘the widest range of gadgets on the planet with the fastest delivery’

You also need to know what your competitors offer. You can't compete if you don't know what you're up against. Take the time to check out what they are doing. Do some research, you'd be surprised what you might or might not find; Special offers, free shipping, a contest, great customer support?

At first, you might struggle expressing the USP tightly and specifically. It may take a few tries. That's okay. Ruthlessly edit away the generalities and aggressively hone the shortest, crispest and most specific promise you could possibly hold out. Then, rework it and cull any excess verbiage or hazy statements until you have a clearly defined and easily apparent Unique Selling Proposition that a customer can immediately grasp. And then, integrate your USP into every marketing aspect of your business, such as display advertising, direct mail and field selling.

USPs work a lot like logos. "It's finger-lickin' good," says Kentucky Fried Chicken's USP. "Melts in your mouth, not in your hands," promises M&M's. A USP shapes and reinforces your company's brand and identity. It says what's different about you from all the rest.

As an example, lets assume your USP is that you have better selection and follow-up service than any other competitor. There are several ways to integrate these qualities into your mail, communications and website. For example you can state the selection USP on the main page:

Or, if good service at an affordable price is your USP, use this as a model:

Also remember, like a niche market, you will not appeal to everybody. Indeed, some USPs are designed to appeal to only one segment of a larger market. There is a big difference between the upmarket ‘premium’ client and the bargain hunters. Its unlikely you can reach both.

How can you ensure that you are in the hearts and minds of your customers after the sale? Here are a few good approaches. Go back to the five ingredients of success. One of these is the employment of excellent customer relationship management skills immediately following a sale. Call or email your customer. Make the customer feel important and special. Repeat your USP and remind the customers why they purchased from you and reassure them about their wise decision.

This post-purchase follow-up is essential, regardless of how frequently you resell to that customer. You enhance the customer's loyalty and value to your business by following up after the sale. At the very least, a follow-up call or email drastically reduces or eliminates cancellations, returns, refunds, complaints, adjustments and disputes.

As a web surfer yourself, you will know that other Internet surfers, like you, have the attention span of Homer Simpson after a few Duffs. You have just seconds to capture their interest before they hit that dreaded ‘back’ button and have a beer instead. Believing you can capture attention or sales through elaborate use of graphics and animation is a mistake. A large number of ezimerchant sites use some pretty plain templates but are enormously successful. So, don’t slow your business down by aggravating with the graphics.

Another popular Internet faux pas, is to make your visitor dig into your site to figure out what your USP is. I love the saying ‘give the monkey the banana.’ Why make your customer go hunting for the product or your USP. Make it as easy as possible for them. Good navigation to easily find the product and the USP right up the front.

Visitors to your site want benefits and solutions. The goal of your home page should be to define that as quickly as possible. That would include a headline that stimulates a response followed by one or more short paragraphs that define your benefits.
To find your USP, answer these three questions:
1. What benefit is unique to your offering, and what is the basis of this claim?
2. Who is the target market for whom this benefit is of compelling interest?
3. What USP has been claimed by significant competitors for this target market?

Some common attributes around which the USP can be created are:
• Quality
• Selection
• Fashion/styling
• Price
• Service
• Location

Challenged? Consider these examples to help you in your strategy for uncovering a unique benefit:

• Years back, Avis strongly challenged Hertz in car rentals with, "We're second, so we try harder." This captures attention. While many cheer the underdog, most go for the favourite when they reach for their wallet. But this worked for Avis. That they tried harder implied to many that Avis would thus make life easier for them.

• When soft-drink leaders Coke and Seven-Up butted heads, Seven-Up promoted its "Un-cola" status to set itself apart from the whole category of cola beverages.

• When Tylenol took on aspirin, it did so with "Aspirin can irritate the stomach lining.... Fortunately, there is Tylenol."

• "Fresh, hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed"? Dominos virtually took over the delivered pizza market with that USP. They didn't even promise the pizza tasted good.

Buyers need to feel they you can trust you. You can assure them with;

• Giving them what they want. Don’t make them hunt all over your website for the product. Let them find it easily. Put your leading product on the front page.

• A good site presentation (Good quality imagery etc.) dodgy looking sites belong to dodgy business people. This doesn’t mean you have to have a website to compete with Adobe or Kodak. You do however need to look professional or look like you belong to the industry your buyer is involved in.

• A return and privacy policy statements (Sample attached)

• A Security statement. (Sample attached)

• Contact numbers and information.

Step 3: Getting found on the Internet.
Aside from utilizing real world marketing tools, there are three essential strategies that can be deployed in attracting visitors and sales to your website. These are:
• Search Engine Submission, Optimization and Ranking
• Pay for Inclusion Services
• Pay Per Click Search Engines
 

Get Ranked on the Search Engines
More than likely you recently used a search engine to find either product, services or information. 81% of Internet users find their products and services through the likes of Yahoo, Google, NineMSN, AltaVista and others to name a few.

So how easy is it going to be to find your site. Lets use Google as an example. Google have over 3 billion files to sort through every time you do a search. Each day they list over 6,500,000 new pages. They have to use over 3000 PC’s to manage this process and add 30 new ones each day! So finding your site amongst all of that is near on impossible. Unless of course you are ranked and when someone searches for your keywords you are listed on the first or second page.

The importance of Search Engine Optimisation and Promotion
When running an online store on the Internet, either selling a product or service, nothing is more important than having a highly ranked site in search engines. The beauty of having your customers find you in search engines is that they are qualified leads. Your potential customers are actually searching for your goods and services

Submission and Optimisation
Submission and Optimisation are two separate elements in the “art” of search engine promotion... “Search engine submission” refers to the act of getting your web site listed with search engines. Another term for this is search engine registration. Getting listed does not mean that you will necessarily rank well for particular terms. It simply means that the search engine knows your pages exist. Think of it like a buying a scratch lotto. Having a ticket doesn’t mean that you will win, but you must have a ticket to have any chance at all.
 

“Search engine optimization” refers to the act of altering your site so that it may rank well for particular terms, especially with crawler-based search engines. Returning to the scratch lotto model, let’s assume there was a way to increase the odds of winning by picking your lotto numbers carefully. Search engine optimization is like this. It’s making sure that the numbers you select are more likely to win than purchasing a set of numbers at random.

Search Engine Placement & Positioning: Ranking Well
Terms such as “search engine placement,” “search engine positioning” and “search engine ranking” refer to a site actually doing well for particular terms or for a range of terms at search engines. This is the ultimate goal for many people—to get that “top ten” ranking for a particular keyword or search terms.

Search Engine Marketing & Promotion: The Overall Process
Terms such as “search engine marketing” or “search engine promotion” refer to the overall process of marketing a site on search engines. This includes submission, optimization, managing paid listings and more.
These terms also highlight the fact that doing well with search engines is not just about submitting right, optimizing well or getting a good rank for a particular term. It’s about the overall job of improving how your site interacts with search engines, so that the audience you seek can find you.

Automatic Submission Software – Beware
Beware of automatic submission software that claims to submit your web site to thousands of search engines. This cheap software plagues the Internet and boasts that you will be listed in all of those search engines around the world. The simple fact of the matter is that over 90% of searches made on the Internet are made in 10 major search engines. So why is this so misleading? Well, the software actually submits to all the “Free for All” lists (FFA’s). Submitting to FFA’s (or Link Farms) used to be done to increase link popularity, therefore increasing your ranking. Search engines used link popularity to improve rankings and some still do. However, the search engine companies believed that people who submitted to FFA’s were “cheating” their rankings. So, links from FFA’s are no longer allowed. As far as Submitting to the major search engines, sure, they do it. However, some of the major search engines now will not lists sites that have used automatic submission software. The main reason is because that software “spams” the search engines (submits too many times)

So what is a Search Engine?
Search engines such as Google comprise of a database that is constructed by “Spiders” or “Robots” that travel the Internet that return and store web site addresses in its database. Because search engines “travel” the Internet, finding web sites, it is possible to get listed without submitting… be prepared for a long wait!

What is a directory?
Directories such as Yahoo! don’t have “spiders” and Robots” to build their database. Instead, Yahoo! uses their staff to manually review and categorise your web site for inclusion in the directory once submitted.
The top ten search engines:
http://www.alltheweb.com/
Altavista www.altavista.com
AOL www.aol.com
Ask Jeeves www.askjeeves.com
Google www.google.com 
HotBot www.hotbot.com
Lycos www.lycos.com
MSN www.msn.com
Teoma www.teoma.com
Overture www.overture.com
Looksmart www.looksmart.com
ODP http://dmoz.org/
Yahoo www.yahoo.com 

Website Optimisation Basics.
As your website evolves over a period of time, it pays to stop and analyse the sites optimisation and whether or not it has slipped. It’s a good strategy to apply fundamental optimisation techniques that work with most search engines.
Lets quickly cover the essentials:
1. Title tag - Begin your Title tag with the keyword you are optimizing for and keep this tag short and meaningful. The Title tag is part of the source code of the website which if you know a little html can be edited manually. Programs like ezimerchant make this process simple and provide easy entry points to enter this data.
2. Meta Description – This is very similar to the Title tag but the description can be a little lengthier and more descriptive.
3. Meta Keywords - Include the keywords that you are targeting. Remember though, you should not fill this tag with too many keywords nor should you write similar keywords one beside the other.
4. Make sure you use the keyword phrase as the first heading in a H1 tag on your main page. Follow this by to writing down well drafted keyword-rich content on the page in the Body of the document. The first few lines (approximately 50-150 words) are all important as this content is frequently used instead of the Meta Description tag that some search engines have stopped using.
5. Content is still king. Create good original content of with at least 250-300 words per page.
6. Links. Link to the internal pages of your website from all other pages with the keywords used as the link text. Start exchanging links with other websites that fall within the same theme or category. Again use your keyword phrase in those links that other webmasters will have on their websites.
 

Keywords. Spiders and Crawlers
So how do you get found on the internet? The answer to this is spiders and crawlers. Basically you are throwing yourself on the web to allow these little creepy software critters to crawl your site. The objective of search engines is to deliver to their customers, those searching for a product or service, a quality result. These results ideally, would be websites that are relevant and have good content. These sites have not been viewed or ranked by a person at the search engine company and instead have been indexed and listed after being ‘crawled’ by what we call a spider. This spider is a piece of software that after finding your site, crawls through each page, following links. Then according to an algorithm built in to the spider, it ranks your site in its importance.

The reason for this is that there are so many sites it is impossible to physically review each one, let alone review each site on a regular basis. However, searchspiders or metacrawlers can do this job automatically. Your ranking dictates where your listing will appear when people search for your primary keyword or term. Ideally you need to be on the first page of results.

So how do you get a good ranking? The very first part of this step is determining how people search for your product or service. With search engines this is based upon what people type into the search query. This is called a keyword or keyword phrase. Therefore the next step in the journey is determining what your keyword and keyword phrases are. We will then describe how to use these to rank your site.

Keyword Selection
When you select a keyword. Its pointless picking keywords where you have to compete with larger players. For example, if you picked a keyword in the music industry that the likes of Sony and other large players use, you will not be able to match their link popularity. Therefore, regardless of the effort you put into your optimisation, all these companies will rank ahead of you.
One way to determine the competitiveness of a key word is to use a tool that evaluates how much companies are actually paying a PPC (Pay Per Click) for a visitor. A good tool is: http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/

When you search the internet through a search engine you use a word, or combination of words to find what you want. We refer to these as key words and key word phrases and terms. One of the most important assessments a spider makes is the amount of times specific phrases and words appear on your pages. This is what we call keyword density.

Naturally some terms are searched for more than others. It is pointless having a word or term that no one searches for. To evaluate how many times a word or term is searched for Overture have a great tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
As always, have a good look at your competitors and look at what key words and phrases they focus on.
1. Include your key word and phrase in your page title.
2. Include your key word and phrase in your description
3. Have a H1 heading at the top of the page that includes the key words and phrase.
4. Include your key word and phrase several times throughout the body text.
5. If possible link keywords to a relevant page.

Choose keywords wisely. The keywords you think might be perfect for your site may not be what people are actually searching for. To find the optimal keywords for your site, use tools such as WordTracker.

Write at least 200 - 250 words of visible text copy based on your chosen keywords. This is a crucial component to high rankings and a successful Web site. The search engines need to "read" keyword rich copy on your pages so they can successfully classify your site. Use each keyword phrase numerous times within your copy for best results.

Counting Keywords
To count the keywords on a page go to: http://www.keywordcount.com/ This free web-based service will report back on the number of times and percentages various keywords appear within it. To check Keyword Density go to http://www.keyworddensity.com/ and specify a keyword or search phrase, and this free service will show you how often it appears on any two web pages that you select. On the results page, selecting the "Search Engine Profiles" option and rerunning the analysis shows you the estimated percentage for each major search engine, rather than for a generic search engine.
 

Having a Web site that gets found in Google isn't hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are some tips.

Get Your Keywords into the Title Tags
The majority of engines place considerable relevance on the HTML title tag, making it generally the most important tag on your page. The title tag also appears in the search results for most of the major engines, making the tags even more important. Having made the point on why you want a title tag, I now want to show you how you can improve traffic by creating REALLY GOOD title tags.

Let's look at some tips for creating title tags that work, and then some mistakes that will cause your site to be passed over in the search results.
• Make sure to include your most important keyword or phrase at the beginning of the title. This is what the spiders will look at when they visit your site.
• Create some sense of urgency
• Offer something free
• Use powerful language that is compelling and exciting
• Ask a question
• Include a title tag on every page of your website

While utilising key words or phrases in your titles to help rank well, remember that titles are also going to be read by human beings. Make sure your titles read well, do not use endless strings of key words or ‘AAA’ methodologies. If the title tag is boring, unprofessional or does not make sense, guess what? Your prospect will not visit you.

Create your title tags in such a way that they will serve as an online marketing campaign for your site. Remember that a well-written and effective title can make up for a lower search engine ranking.

Creating Meta tags.
Meta tags are less important than they used to be but still can be valuable. Create descriptions that use your keywords and also describes your site. The information in this tag often appears under your Title in the search engine results pages.

Extra tips to Improve Your Ranking
Use extra "goodies" to boost rankings. Things like headlines, image alt tags, header tags <H1><H2>, etc.), links from other pages, keywords in file names, and keywords in hyperlinks can cumulatively boost search engine rankings. Use any or all of these where they make sense for your site.
Don't expect quick results. Getting high rankings takes time; there's no getting around that fact.
If after working through the optimization processes and submitting your site, you still can't find your site in the engines, the first place to look will be your page copy. If you added less than 250 words of visible text on your pages, this is probably your problem. Double check your keyword density, and make sure that you only targeted two or three phrases per page.

Analysing Your Position.
After selecting you keyword and keyword terms its now time to check out the potential of the market space you have selected and what the competition is going to be like.

Step One. Go to the tools page in overture and click on the Terms suggestion link.
Type in the keywords and terms you have selected. This will tell you how many times each month that a term is searched for in the Overture Network. Naturally you can multiply the number to count similar searches in Google and other engines not supplied by the Overture network.

Step Two. Type in the keyword/phrases into the Google Search engine. The first page of results you see is the page you want to be on. Now lets see how competitive theses sites are. On a search for a term lead generation, I landed the following result:

The title or heading is drawn from the title tag on the page and the description either from the description tag or first paragraph on the page. Click on the ‘Cached’ page link. This will show the page that Google has cached and will highlight the keywords you selected in this search.
From viewing this you can see whether they have spent any effort in optimising. If they have, it should conform to the basics described previously. Go back to the search page and then click on the title to go to the main page. Then, from the main explorer task bar select View and then Source. From here you ca see whether and what they have inserted into the title and metatags.

Step three. Link Popularity. Now its time to check your competitor’s link popularity. Can you beat him? Do you need to? Make sure to review both the top listing and last from the first page of results from a search. Just because the top listing might be a heavy hitter, does not mean you won’t have a chance. Go to MarketLeap.com and select the link popularity….

Link popularity plays a critical role in the ranking of your website with search engines. Without other sites linking to you, your website is simply not going to rank and is not going to be found by search engines. In fact, some engines require at least one or more links coming to your Web site or they will drop you from their index.
So What is Link Popularity

Link popularity is how many external links on the Web point to your own Web site. Therefore, if you have 217 Web pages on other Web site domains pointing to your domain, then your link popularity is 217. Your link popularity will vary on each search engine because each engine has a different set of pages in its index.

Check how many pages are linked to you.
In the tips and Tools Newsletter I included links to sites that measure Link Popularity. Marketleap Visibility Index This service will quickly compare your link popularity across four major search engines. It will also compare your site to up to three other Web sites that you designate. This is a handy feature to see how you stack up against your competition. It's also great to find out who is linking to you. The link service displays coloured graphs so that you can visually compare your popularity scores for different search engines or different Web sites. In addition, you can have your link popularity report e-mailed to you weekly, twice a month, or monthly if you want.
 

The more sites that link to you the better. Some of the major engines, like Google, favour links from popular sites. A few links from Web sites with a high link popularity can be better than a larger number of links from less popular sites. Also some engines boost rankings for a keyword when they find links to a site that include the targeted keywords in the linking text.
It is also important to understand that generally speaking, link popularity is based on the number of links from a domain or Web site, not from each page within the Web site?

Building Your link Popularity
1. Trade Links. This is the oldest method of improving link popularity and requires a lot of effort. However it can payoff. You simply email or contact the Webmaster of a site that is complementary but generally not competitive to your own. You then ask them to link to your site hopefully with a little dialogue attached explaining your site. In turn you offer a link back to them.
2. Visit related sites and check whether they offer guest books or forums. If they do, post a message, and include your URL in your signature.
3. List your site on the major directories such as Yahoo!, Looksmart, and Open Directory Project. Open Directory is free and a good place to start. Also, see if your site is relevant to a particular About.com area, and submit it to the guide.
4. Visit Link Popularity Check and search for your competitors. Visit the sites that are linked to your competitors, and write to see if they'll consider linking to your site.
5. Consider setting up separate domains and link all of these together.
6. Offer a discount on your goods or services for anyone who agrees to post a small graphic on their site that links back to your site. Create a testimonial page, and write a brief testimonial about any Web site that you'd like to get linked to your site. Inform the site of the testimonial, and encourage them to link to the page.
7. Or, write testimonials of particular products, and sign the testimonial with your name and URL. Send the testimonials out to the individual companies, and tell them how much you've enjoyed using their products. Many companies will place testimonials in particular areas of their site, and they're delighted to get rave reviews about their products.
8. Offer awards on your site, and give out little graphics that link back to your site.

Step 4: Customer Acquisition and Management
Email marketing and Customer Lists
A common theme amongst successful online businesses is great customer management. Most of these businesses spend considerable effort in acquiring, managing and servicing growing email lists. From slow beginnings they have worked at it and built lists that are worth rivers of gold to their business.

Your most valuable email asset: an in-house, opt-in list
If you are online and you are not building an email list of customers and prospects, you may be making a costly mistake. Why? Because the opportunity to build opt-in lists will become more limited in the future as the volume of email rises. Now is the time to build trust and start an email relationship with your clients and customers. You'll need to make the collection of email addresses a top priority for every contact with customers or prospects.

If we have done your job well in optimizing the website for search engines, the website and online ads will be primary drivers in an acquisition campaign designed to build your list. You must have on each page of your website an email subscription form to capture addresses.

There are also other ways to acquire subscribers. Consider as well offline media, especially direct mail; onsite promotions and events; print and broadcast ads. Of all the components needed to successfully build an effective email list, the most important component is the value proposition to the consumer. If you are forthright with regard to what you plan to give the consumer, you will build a list of interested prospects. Don’t just mail boring price lists and sales slogans. Give them something of value at the same time. This could be important information or something entertaining. This way they will stay on the list and give you opportunities to continue to sell to them.

The best email lists concentrate on quality, not quantity. Its better to have a list of 5,000 prospects who want to hear from you on a regular basis than a list of 20,000 who are only marginally committed. Good email lists deliver as much value to a subscriber as the product or service it promotes.

Make the most from your Email Campaign.
Some important tips
1. Deliver your most important information first
The key benefits and sales points must be communicated in the first screen people read.
2. Continuously test your campaigns
Gauge response by testing one element of your email at a time. Start with the subject line. Test headlines, body copy, layout etc. Successful marketing copy is always tested, one element at a time.
3. Make the subject line your headline
This is what people see first. If it's strong, crisp, and compelling, they'll open your email. Concentrate on this all-important element. Don’t use tacky and misleading headlines. If you can help them recognise the source of the email…you. Place that into the title.
4. Personalise your message.
Whenever you email your customers you should always personalise the message. When "John" sees Dear John, he is likely to recognize the mail as something directed specifically to him and probably coming from someone he knows.
5. Your message needs to benefit the customer.
Customers will always asking "What's in it for me?" The message should include a benefit, solve a problem, contain newsworthy information, offer something special, anything that represents a reason why the reader would be interested.

Other Important Considerations
Site Meters
"If it can't be measured, it can't be managed" - a basic rule of marketing, both in online business and in the physical world. Site development and Search engine Optimisation is an going process. Generally speaking you will make some edits and alterations and then post the updates. Certainly I would recommend this to allow you the opportunity to evaluate individual modifications. So how do you evaluate this? By measuring the traffic on your website.
It is essential that you are able to monitor traffic to your site. This will help you develop the site to generate revenue. You might be successful at attracting traffic to your site, but not at converting that traffic to sales or visa versa. It is the only way to identify those parts of your strategy that are working and those that need more work.

How do you know what your Internet visitors are looking at when they hit your site? Having a better understanding of the popular pages on your site assists in planning future development and increasing web site traffic.

Do you know how long Internet visitors are there for, how they entered your site or what country they are from? You might be receiving hundreds or thousands of hits a day, but if the visitors were only on your site for 15 seconds each, that would indicate there's a problem.