Solely depending on Search Engine traffic isn’t enough… Sure, it’s wonderful when traffic magically appears from the search engines, but it’s often times too little, too late.  Plus, search engines are fickle.  One day they can send you tons of traffic and a week later you’re lucky to get a handful of visitors.

Be proactive in your website marketing and promotion

There are many ways to market, promote, and drive traffic to your website. And, most of them are free or almost free.

Pick 3 or 4 of the methods listed below and run with them. Avoid the temptation to try them all at once.  Pick a couple methods, use them for a couple months and measure their results.  If it’s working, keep doing it.  If it isn’t as successful as you were hoping, tweak it it or move on to another method.

And now for the big ole list…

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• XML Sitemaps / Ping
• Maintain Web 2.0 websites
• Feeder sites
• Lead Generation sites
• Social Media / Friends / Networking
• Social Bookmarking
• Blog Commenting
• Article Marketing
• Forum Marketing
• Classified Ad Sites
• Answers Websites
• Promote Link Bait
• Website Directories
• Press Releases
• Auction Sites
• Video Marketing
• Opt-in lists
• Podcasting
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Sell through Affiliate Networks
• Set up your own Affiliate Program
• Link Exchange Networks
• Distribute gadgets/software/themes/utilities/etc
• Public Speaking
• Get Interviewed
• Word of Mouth
• Interview people with a following/list
• JV/Partner with a business
• Wikis
• Shopping Sites
• Coupon Sites
• Job/Project Sites
• Contest Sites
• Kindle / Amazon Marketplace
• Bulletin Boards at gas stations, grocery stores, etc
• Yahoo Groups
• eZine Directories
• PDF Directories
• eCourse Directories
• Blog / RSS Directories
• Google Gadgets
• Software Directories
• Create a DVD course
• Subscribe to your own feeds
• Give Stuff Away
• Stop in face-to-face
• Become an author
• Create a local group
• Tradeshows
• Toll Free voicemail info line
• Testimonials
• Magazine and newspapers ads

Have other marketing, promoting and traffic generating ideas?  Want to share some of your experiences?  Please leave your comments/questions below.

You’ll be able to browse and search for existing color palettes or create your own.  And, you don’t have to be an expert in color theory.  All that stuff is programmed into the site.

You’ll be able to create a color scheme two different ways: From a Base Color and From an Image.

Creating schemes from a Base Color

When you use the Base Color method, you’ll be able to create schemes based on the following theories/rules

• Analogous
• Monochromatic
• Triad
• Complementary
• Compound
• Shades
• Custom

Just pick your color and a rule and Kuler will figure everything out for you.

Creating schemes from an Image

Kuler will let you upload one of your own images or you can browse Flickr to find photographs with colors that catch your eye.  Once you’ve found an image, Kuler will pull colors from the image and create schemes with the following moods:

• Colorful
• Bright
• Muted
• Deep
• Dark
• Custom

Adobe has thrown together a pretty good introduction video on how to use Kuler. So rather than me blabbing on and on about it, just check out the Kuler Tutorial Video.

Here’s what it looks like:

Preview Theme | Download Theme

As you can tell by all the Coming Soons below, this page is still in progress. I’ll update it as I get a few spare minutes here and there.

Features / Cool Stuff

coming soon

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coming soon

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coming soon

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coming soon

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coming soon

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coming soon

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]]> http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/internet/amphion-wordpress-theme-released/feed http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/internet/carthage-wordpress-theme-released http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/internet/carthage-wordpress-theme-released#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:00:23 +0000 Jeff Fluguear http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/?p=441 Carthage is a simple yet optimized Wordpress theme packed with features. It uses colors instead of images so it can be used by a multitude of businesses, industries, or niches without needing customization.

Here’s what it looks like:

Preview Theme | Download Theme

As you can tell by all the Coming Soons below, this page is still in progress. I’ll update it as I get a few spare minutes here and there.

Features / Cool Stuff

coming soon

Installation

coming soon

Usage and Customization

coming soon

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coming soon

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]]> http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/internet/carthage-wordpress-theme-released/feed http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/internet/effective-website-goal-3-build-your-business http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/internet/effective-website-goal-3-build-your-business#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:48:01 +0000 Jeff Fluguear http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/?p=413 Welcome to part three of the Effective Website Goals series.  Parts one and two talked about 1) increasing revenue and decreasing expenses and 2) creating more free time.  Today let’s talk about how your website should build and grow your business.

Believe it or not, not all websites are designed to make money or save time. Some take a longer term approach and are designed to build the business.  True, this often translates into making money down the road once the business has been built up.

I’m sure there are hundreds of different ways to break this topic down, but I’m going to keep it simple and break it into two parts:

• Creating an Asset
• Building Trust / Authority / Relationships

First off, I hope that you are running your business as if you’ll sell it one day. It truly is the best way to run a business because it helps you make better decisions each and every day. Plus, it makes building an asset and trust important goals for a website.

Creating an Asset

There’s a whole lot more to your website than just the dollars and cents it makes for you each month. It’s an asset and becomes more valuable as you add new pages, get backlinks, build systems, and increase your traffic/readership.

Building an Archive of Knowledge
By continually adding quality and relevant content to your website, you’ll create a huge archive of knowledge. Over time you’ll get much more search engine traffic and become a place for people to look first when they have questions or problems that need fixed.

Adding Backlinks
As your archive of knowledge grows, you’ll undoubtedly start getting more people linking to your site. This has two huge benefits. First you’ll get more non-search engine traffic to your site.  And, these backlinks will help move your rankings up in the search engines.  Two benefits for the price of one.

Systematizing Your Business
You’ve probably heard it said hundreds of times, but McDonalds doesn’t have the best food on the planet. But, they do have extensive systems that make it a very profitable and desirable franchise.

Try to set up systems in your business and website. It’ll help you in day to day productivity and efficiency. And, it’ll increase the value of your business. Check out E-Myth Revisited for more information about setting up systems for your business.

Increase Readership / Following
So now your website has lots of relevant information, is getting lots of direct link  and search engine traffic. Now it’s time to capture your visitors’ information so you can communicate with them when they aren’t visiting your website. This leads directly into the next way to build your business… Trust / Authority / Relationships.

Building Trust / Authority / Relationships

Once people trust you and see you as an authority/expert, it’s a lot easier to sell and promote your business. For example, I personally see Dr. Phil as a semi-tubby dude. (He may or may not really be tubby, but that’s how I picture him). Anyway, due to his following and many people see him as expert, he’s able to put his name on weight loss type products.  How can a guy sell weight loss books when he himself could stand to lose some weight?  It’s all because of his expert status and his followers trust him to promote good products / information.

Your business can take advantage of this same expert / following phenomenon, but hopefully your image/expertise will fall more in line with the goods you are promoting.

Becoming an Authority / Expert
I’ve already talked about building up your “archive of knowledge” on your website. This will go a long way in building your credibility and helping you be seen as an expert in your industry. You’ve continually proven yourself to be competent and trustworthy.

If you’re a plumber and your website has helped someone fix a drippy faucet and unclog a their backed up drain, they will definitely think of calling you next time they need a plumber for a big project.

Creating Relationships
Another goal of your website is to build relationships with your visitors. Not only through your website, but through social networking, email, and RSS feeds.

Relationships through your Website
Ideally you want as many ways possible for your visitors to interact with your site. Whether that be adding comments to your posts, responding to other visitors’ comments, participating in forums, taking polls, etc. The more they can interact, the more they’ll come back.

Social Networking
There are hundreds of social networking sites and you should participate in as many you have time for (as long as they are related to your business and your customers hang out there).

For instance, most all businesses should be using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Then, search for specialty/niche social networks that relate to your business. If you sell yarn, join some knitting and  crocheting social networks/forums.

When participating in social networking sites/forums, it’s important to follow the rules, be helpful, and don’t directly sell. As you prove your worth, people will visit your website when they are ready.

Email Marketing
For just a few dollars a month, you can sign up with an email marketing service. Sure, you could manage the mail list yourself, but you’ll soon find out it is a huge headache. Plus, you get access to a lot of cool stuff that you can’t easily do if you’re flying solo.

RSS Feeds
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a great way of letting your customers decide where and how they get information from you.  Your customers can “subscribe” to your website through MyYahoo, Google, or one of hundreds of other feed readers. Then, every time you add posts to your website, the headline will appear on their MyYahoo, Google, etc page.  If the headline interests them, the rest of your post is just a click away.

Conclusion

You should view your website as an asset that will grow in value over time.  There are quite a few ways you can accelerate the rise in value.  This is the third goal of an effective website.

Every time you add quality content to your site you increase the value of your asset. Granted, it might be slow going at first, but eventually you’ll hit a point where search engines start to love you, people start talking about and linking to your site, and WHAMMO, you’ve got a very valuable website on your hands.

Another way to build the value of your site is to participate and communicate with your market outside of your website. Think of this is the new and improved way to advertise.

Anyone can buy a banner ad on a website that says “We’re the best company”.  That’s easy… it just takes a few dollars and it doesn’t prove in anyway whatsoever that you are the best.

But, if you participate in a forum and answer just one prospect’s question, you’ve just PROVEN that:

1. You do know what you’re talking about.
2. You’re trustworthy.
3. You’re an all around likable person.

As the number of your followers, subscribers, and fans increase, so does the value of your business.

Please leave any comments, questioins, or thoughts below.

Sure making money is great. But as they say, what good is the money if you don’t have any time to enjoy it?

An effective website should give you more free time that you can either use to enjoy yourself of to spend it on creating new and exciting projects.

Ways to get more free time

• Automate tasks
• Scheduling / Batching / Time Shifting
• Answer commonly asked questions
• Re-use content
• Provide support/training

Website Automation

Your website shouldn’t create more busy work for you. You didn’t go into business because you love busy work.

So, be sure that your website is full of “parts” that will run on autopilot once set up. Stuff that you’ll be confident is working without your input. Just check in on it once a month and make any tweaks if needed.

A good example of this is your email list. Yes, every business should have an email list!

When your business sets up the email list, it’ll probably take about an hour to get it set up right. Then, all of the tedious tasks of adding new members, unsubscribing people, checking for bad email addresses, dealing with SPAM compliance, and scheduling emails will be automated.  It all happens without your involvement.

Spend an hour upfront and you’ll have a worry free system that’ll run for year. Now that’s automation.

Scheduling / Time-Shifting

Even things that cannot be completely automated can usually be scheduled or time-shifted.

Let’s say you want to write and publish 3 articles on your site per week  (Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday). Time shifting gives you the option of writing all three articles on Sunday night then scheduling them so they magically appear on your site in the future.

There’s no reason why you couldn’t write a whole month’s worth of articles and one day, schedule them in advance, then fly off to Paris for the rest of the month.

When writing articles in advance, just make sure that you’re not writing about something time sensitive.  For instance, don’t write about “recent” stock market trends and schedule it to appear a month later.  The trends you wrote about might not be relevant a month down the road.

Answer Common Questions

If your business deals with customers on the phone or via email, you more than likely get asked the same 10 questions over and over again.

• What time to you close?
• Can I get directions to your store?
• Is your refrigerator running?

Having these answers on your website won’t cut out all of these questions, but it will certainly reduce them. Plus, including a map and driving instructions on your site will be much more beneficial to your customers/prospects that trying to give verbal directions over the phone.

Re-Use Content

This is similar to the whole automation and commonly asked questions section, but I think it deserves a separate spot to its own.

Let’s use a hardware store as an example… Spring rolls around and people start moving their gas grills from the garage to their deck. So, Handy Hardware Store creates a quick video on how to clean a gas grill and puts it on their site.

Cool.  They took a few hours and created great content for their website. Here comes the fun part… They can now reuse this video to market their website and business. They can use a free service like TubeMogul and quickly upload the video to a bunch of popular video sites  (YouTube, for instance).

And, with a little research, Handy Hardware Store can probably find local video sites to upload their video to.  Check your local television stations, newspapers, magazines, etc.  Chances are one or more of them will have a user/community section where you can upload video.

When adding your video to other sites, be sure to include your business and website in the video so people can find you.

Fast forward a year… Spring once again rolls around, so Handy Hardware Store includes a link to the grill cleaning video in their print and email newsletters.

Provide Support / Training / Demonstration

Let’s use the hardware store as an example again but this time the customer has a problem with their toilet. The “guts” in the back tank aren’t working so the toilet doesn’t stop running.

Mal-Wart sells repair Kit A for $10 and Handy Hardware sells repair Kit B for $12.  But, Handy Hardware is able to tell their customers that their website has a step-by-step video demonstration on how to install Kit B. Most customers will pay the extra $2 for the peace of mind knowing they won’t get stuck half way through the project.

Again, this step-by-step video demonstration can be reused.  Not only can it be uploaded to a bunch of video sharing sites, it could also be combined with other Handy Hardware demonstrations to create a DVD. The DVD could either be sold at a discounted price or given away to anyone who buys a $50 gift card.  The options are really endless.

Conclusion

The second goal of an effective website is to help save you time and energy. Every business has many tedioius and repetitive tasks that need to be done on a regular basis.  Your website shouldn’t add to this list.

Computers love to do tedious work.  Well, maybe they are indifferent to any type of work, but they excel at tedious and repetitive task.  So make sure that you’re website will run on autopilot and handle all of these tasks for you.

Please leave any comments, questioins, or thoughts below.

I believe that all small businesses can benefit from an internet strategy that starts with a good website as the foundation. Just having a website isn’t enough. The secret is to make sure the website is effective so you’re not just wasting your time and money. Or, even worse, wasting your customers/prospects time and money.

So how do you go about making sure your website is effective?

There are three main goals to an effective website.  It should do one or more of the following:

1. Increase your Profits
2. Save you Time
3. Build your Business

Welcome to “Effective Website Goal #1: Increase Your Profits” (part one of a three part series. Can you guess what parts 2 and 3 will be about?)

As you probably know, there are two components to profit, revenue and expenses.  To increase your profit you need to increase revenue, decrease expenses, or a combination of both. For some reason most people forget about this when dealing with their website.

Increasing your Revenue

Since every business is different and has a different revenue model, I’m just going to quickly cover revenue and be as generic as possible.

Before you start building your site, make sure you have defined and specific objectives for the site. Will it generate revenue

• via online sales / shopping cart?
• by sending customers into your store?
• by generating phone/email leads?
• from advertising sales?
• other?

If one of the goals of your site is to make money, be sure that you know specifically how it’ll make money.

Decreasing your Expenses

The expenses involved with a website are a bit more universal. Every small business will have the same types of expenses, it’s just a matter of how much they choose to pay for them. These expenses are:

1. Domain Name
2. Website Development / Initial Setup
3. Website Hosting
4. Website Maintenance / Updates
5. Marketing

Domain Name Expense

Your domain name (mysite.com, for instance) will cost you $8-15 a year.  If you’re paying substantially more than that, something isn’t right. Either your registrar is ripping you off and it’s time to transfer your domain to someplace else.  Or, your web design or hosting company is acting as a middle man and pocketing a big wad of cash. Again, time to transfer your domain.

Website Development / Initial Expense

Unless you’re building the website yourself you’ll probably have to pay someone to build the site for you. The trick is making sure you only buy what you really need and to buy from an internet marketer.

In the past, there were basically two types of people who built websites: computer geeks and computer graphic artists. Now these are fine people, it’s just that they are no longer the people you want building your site.

Don’t buy your site from a traditional “web design” firm
Go talk to a web design firm full of computer geeks and they’ll tell you your site needs to have all the fancy, trendy, and cutting edge bells and whistles.  While these things are cool and all, they usually don’t translate into making your small business any extra money.  They do, however, make the web design firm a boatload of money.

Don’t buy your site from a graphic artist
Go talk to a graphic artist, and they’ll tell you that your site needs to be gorgeous and perfectly portray the image of your business. True, they’ll probably set you up with a beautiful eye-pleasing design suitable for framing and hanging on your office wall.  But, again, will this translate into making you more money?

Buy from an internet marketer
Go talk to someone who doesn’t just build websites for other people, but also builds and runs their OWN website businesses. Ask them how they build sites for themselves. They’ll tell you to focus on:

1. A clean, simple, easy to navigate design. It doesn’t have to be a unique or award winning layout… Just professional in appearance.
2. Functional - Everything on the site works toward achieving your goals. No unneeded features/graphics.
3. Spend time on writing good content.  The words on your site are what sells.
4. Act fast - Get something on the site right away.  It doesn’t have to be perfect.  You can always make changes/improvements as time goes on.
5. Don’t spend a lot of money on the site.  Use it for marketing and getting traffic to your site. (if you really feel the need to spend money)

There are some businesses that do need all the bells and whistles or the beautiful graphic intensive website, but for the mass majority of small businesses, it’s just an unneeded expense.  I’ve seen hundreds of small business owners shell out thousands of dollars for a website (a huge expense) without even thinking about how much (if any) revenue they’ll gain from the site. And, they rarely calculate the break even point.

Website Hosting Expense

All businesses will need to have a place on the internet to store their “stuff”.  Things like web pages, images, videos, audio files, documents, etc. So, you’ll need to pay for hosting.  (Although there are a bunch of free places to store your stuff so if you don’t mind putting up with advertising having things scattered over the net, you could probably run your business without hosting. Maybe that’ll be a future article)

Anyway, hosting will run you anywhere from $2 per month to hundreds of dollars a month.  For most small businesses $10 a month should do nicely.

Website Maintenance / Updates Expense

Any successful website will need to be updated frequently.  And by updated, I mean added to.  You’ll want to regularly add new content to your website to keep it “fresh”.  The search engines like new stuff, so keeping your site fresh will eventually drive more search engine traffic your way.

Unfortunately, most small businesses don’t consider this when they have their site built.  So, they aren’t able to update the site themselves and they have to pay their webmaster $100 an hour to add stuff.  It’s hard to be motivated to keep your site fresh when it costs you an arm and a leg.

When building your site, make sure that YOU’LL be able to easily and quickly maintain your website.  You should be able to add content, edit existing content, add links, add images, and other common day-to-day tasks. There should be tutorials / instructions on how to maintain your site. This way,  if you do decide to hire someone to make updates, you have the option of paying $8 an hour instead of $100.

Marketing Expense

If you want to have a successful website, you’ll need to drive traffic to your site.  This can be done “organically” by hoping and wishing search engines will send you traffic.  Or, you can spend some time and money marketing your site.

Search engines are wonderful things but I usually tell people not to depend on them.  They are fickle and change the rules quite often. One day you might get 100 visitors from search engines and then they change their algorithm and you get 3 visitors a day.

Be proactive and market your site using a combination of free and paid techniques. This way you’re diversified so if one traffic source dries up, you won’t die of thirst.

We recommend that most small businesses start out with free internet marketing techniques. As they find out what works and what doesn’t, then maybe start expanding to the paid world. So, for most small businesses, the only marketing expense will be your time and energy.

Conclusion

There are two parts to increasing your profits by running an effective website.  You can either increase profits, decrease expenses, or hopefully a combination of both.

When building your website, be sure to know exactly how you’ll generate revenue from the site.  Just like any other marketing tool, there will be expenses in running your website.  Just make sure you keep close tabs on them and that you aren’t paying too much and it’s possible to break even (the quicker the better)

Here’s a common sense example. Let’s say you are getting ready for a garage sale.  You gather everything up, put those little price stickers on the toaster, your old croquet set, etc.  When you’re finished, you total everything up and find that if you sold everything, you’d make $500.  Hurray, you’ve figured out how you’ll make money and how much potential money can be made.  Do you now go down to your local paper and spend $2500 on a full page advertisement?  I’d hope not, but that’s exactly what small businesses do when they buy a website for thousands and thousands of dollars.

Please leave any comments, questions, or thoughts below.

I happened upon a video where Guy Kawasaki talks about entrepreneurship and business startups. And, quite frankly, I couldn’t stop watching. Most of the times I’ll just have the video playing in the background while I work on other things. But I actually stopped everything I was doing and dedicated 40 minutes to watching the whole video.

He gives his top ten pieces of advice for entrepreneurs and throws in a few entertaining jokes/stories along the way. The presentation is from TiECon on May 13, 2006.

You can download the video, his PowerPoint slides, and read a bit more about his wardrobe on his blog.

The presentation is loosely based on his book “The Art of the Start.” Has anyone read this book? Would you recommend it? Are there other Guy Kawasaki books that you’d recommend?

Here’s what it looks like:

Preview Theme | Download Theme

As you can tell by all the Coming Soons below, this page is still in progress.  I’ll update it as I get a few spare minutes here and there.

Features / Cool Stuff

coming soon

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]]> http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/internet/athena-wordpress-theme-released/feed http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/internet/calydon-wordpress-theme-released http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/internet/calydon-wordpress-theme-released#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 15:58:51 +0000 Jeff Fluguear http://internetbusinessandmarketing101.com/?p=125 Calydon is a simple yet optimized Wordpress theme packed with features. It uses colors and generic images so it can be used by a multitude of businesses, industries, or niches without needing customization.

Here’s what it looks like:

Preview Theme | Download Theme

As you can tell by all the Coming Soons below, this page is still in progress. I’ll update it as I get a few spare minutes here and there.

Features / Cool Stuff

coming soon

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coming soon

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