Grow Your Home Business - Three Types of Sites You Must Have

There are a lot of things that go into running a successful home business; and having an online presence is one of the most important.  This is not necessary for all home businesses, but the majority of home businesses are the type that should have one.  In many cases, the bulk of revenue of a home business comes from online activity.

A good place to start when it comes to online marketing is to learn and understand the three types of websites used in creating an identity on the internet. The three sites are: a branding site, sales letter and a squeeze page. Listed below are these three types of sites and a brief description of each. This will give you a better understanding of each one and help you decide which ones, if not all, will help your home business grow.

Branding Site- This is a site typically used to promote the individual behind the business, or the actual business.  This type of site usually will contain link titles such as home, about us, products and affiliate links.  To help you understand this site a little better just look at the name branding site, the word  "brand" means to trademark or label. So if you decide to do a branding site keep that in mine, let people know who you and/or your business are.

Sales Letter- This type of site is quite simple.  The sole purpose of this site is to sell a specific product or service.  A sales letter is one seemingly long page that explains all of the benefits of whatever they are selling.  A good sales letter should have 12-15 order now buttons, meaningful testimonials and a well written description of the product or service being sold. This site is very important to have because; a good sales letter can generate a ton of sales for your home business.

Squeeze Page- This is without a doubt the most important page to have.  The purpose of the page is to do one thing and one thing only; capture a person’s information, such as, name and primary email address.  A squeeze page will help you build a huge mailing list that you can market your products to.  A good squeeze page should be able to grab the attention of anyone who sees it.  Squeeze pages usually consist of a headline, sub-headline, testimonial, and a sign up box.

Having these three sites listed above really is a great way to get started on the internet. Each site is completely different and has their own individual purpose.  Use the one’s that you feel will benefit your business; although, it is not uncommon for a home business to implement all three into their internet marketing plan.

Dr. Ande
SEO Tips for Small Business

Building Your List with Give Away Ventures

With the awareness of the importance of list building, comes a recent Internet Marketing trend which was started just a couple of years ago for the mutual benefits of all Internet Marketers and mailing list owners.

This method is more recognized as a “starting a Give Away venture”.

In a real sense, a Give Away event is much like a big time version of ad swaps. In a nutshell, a group of mailing list owners partner together and pool in their individual gifts in one limited-time event.

Each participating partner contributes a gift to the event. The gift can be a free product, membership pass or a product he is already selling (if he is kind enough to offer into the event).

The participating partner prepares a Lead Capture Page where he gives the gift in exchange for the subscriber’s email address. In other words, in order for a visitor to download the digital gift, he must opt in and subscribe to your mailing list.

When the gifts are pooled together into one event (site), every partner will then endorse the Give Away event to their own mailing lists.

The result: lots of visitors to one event as a collective effort of several participating partners!

With so many visitors downloading gifts from one focused event, it is a true win-win situation. This is because the visitors get to download several free gifts for their own use and every partner gets to build their own mailing list!

You can easily get notified about a Give Away event in the making by communicating with other Internet Marketers often or participating in Internet Marketing discussion and Joint Venture boards.

Dr. Ande
SEO Tips for Small Business

Tips for Small Business Costs

Many first-time business owners are completely overwhelmed or unprepared by the amount of small business costs associated with operating a business. Small business costs often lead to the failure of many businesses, especially during the first year, or they even prevent them from getting started in the first place. Through a wide array of government and private programs, however, many small business owners have helpful options to help them finance their mounting small business costs.

A business plan is a necessity for obtaining business startup loans and funding for your business. Without one, most banks and investors will not even consider providing you with business startup loans or other funding for your new business. But a business plan provides more than just the opportunity to receive funding. Properly done it is also a blueprint for you to map out your future success in a written plan that you can stick to.

A business plan for the sole purpose of receiving a small business startup loan must contain several components. The first few pages include the Executive Summary and the Table of Contents. After this is the company description. This is one of the most important sections of a business plan. Your company description will give potential investors a short history of your small business along with the future you are planning for it. It describes plans you might have to expand your business. For purposes of getting small business startup loans, this is one of the sections that loan providers and investors are most interested in.

In the company description, you will want to avoid mentioning that your business is a startup business. Startup businesses are considered very risky investments by most investors. As an alternative, outline details of what you have contributed to the industry that you are currently in or plan on entering. Without sounding arrogant, mention some details or things that you have changed or something you have done differently than others in your market that has proved to be successful. Also, discuss how your business has grown in recent months or years and don't be shy about your predicted growth. Your excitement and passion regarding your new business needs to be seen in the writing of your business plan to help increase your chances of getting a business startup loan.

One of the last parts of a well-written business plan, but certainly not the least important, is your marketing plan analysis. This is an explanation of your demographics using facts and figures and a study done about your new, potential customers and clients. This section also explains your advertising plans, especially your target market and how you intend to reach them. This section must show that you have done extensive research, appropriate with your market to ensure that your product or service has a large demand. In order to obtain small business startup loans, you will also need to include a sound financial plan, including pro-forma financial statements for your new business.

Small business costs can be a large concern for entrepreneurs and first-time business owners. Fortunately, small business owners have access to business startup loans as well as other forms of business startup funding to help them overcome their financial stress. A business plan is an ideal way to show investors that you are serious about your new venture and that you know how to make it a success. With a some extra financial help, most small businesses can pull through the tough times and remain a viable business.

Dr. Ande
SEO Tips for Small Business

6 Simple Search Engine Strategies

Perhaps the most important -- and inexpensive -- strategy is to rank high for your preferred keywords on the main search engines in "organic" or "natural" searches (as opposed to paid ads). Search engines send robot "spiders" to index the content of your webpage, so let's begin with steps to prepare your webpages for optimal indexing. The idea here is not to trick the search engines, but to leave them abundant clues as to what your webpage is about. This approach is called "search engine optimization," abbreviated as SEO.

1. Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page -- rich in keywords you want people to find you with -- using 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title (such as "the," "and," etc.) as possible, while still making it readable. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format: <TITLE>Web Marketing Checklist -- 37  Ways to Promote Your Website</TITLE>. (It also shows on the blue bar at the top of your web browser.)

Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that's what people will be searching for, don't just use your company name "Acme Ammunition, Inc.," use "Silver and Platinum Bullets -- Acme Ammunition, Inc." The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title (called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is your identity on the search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.


2. Write a Description META Tag. Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title in the search results. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases on this page. Don't include keywords that don't appear on the webpage. Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format:

<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Increase visitor hits, attract traffic through submitting URLs, META tags, news releases, banner ads, and reciprocal links.">
The maximum number of characters should be about 255; just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.

When I prepare a webpage, I write the article first, then develop a keyword-rich title (#1 above). Then I write a description of the content in that article in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and keyphrases included in the article. This goes into the description META tag.

Next, I strip out the common words, leaving just the meaty keywords and phrases and insert those into the keywords META tag. It's no longer used much for ranking, but I'm leaving it in anyway. I think it may have some minor value. So to summarize so far, every webpage in your site should have a distinct title and META description tag. If you implement these two points, you're well on your way to better search engine ranking. But there's more that will help your ranking....


3. Include Your Keywords in Headers (H1, H2, H3). Search engines consider keywords that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags. Don't expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines -- it won't. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine. (Note: Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That's a big mistake. Make sure your designer defines these tags in the CSS rather than creating headline tags with other names.)


4. Position Your Keywords in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document -- where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You don't want to just artificially stuff keywords here, however. More is not better. Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high, so don't overdo it.


5. Include Descriptive Keywords in the ALT Attribute of Image Tags. This helps your site be more accessible to site-impaired visitors (www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/glance/) and gives additional clues to the search engines. The ALT attributes do help get your images ranked higher for image search (see #12 below).


6. Use Keywords in Hyperlinks. Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your webpage. When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important, so hyperlink your important keywords and keyphrases. To emphasize it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or keyphrase, such as blue-widget.htm -- another clue for the search engine.

7. Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly. You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don't read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site. Don't set up your navigation system using HTML frames (an old, out-dated approach); they can cause severe indexing problems.

Some content management systems and eCommerce catalogs produce dynamic, made-on-the-fly webpages, often recognizable by question marks in the URLs followed by long strings of numbers or letters. Overworked search engines sometimes have trouble parsing long URLs and may stop at the question mark, refusing to go any further. If you find the search engines are't indexing your interior pages, you might consider URL rewriting, a site map, or commercial solutions.

Every Page of a Site Indexed by Search Engines is a Potential Landing Page.

The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to leave few landings to chance. The content of the page and/or links to the page are optimized for very specific, carefully researched keywords and phrases. Those keywords and phrases that are of most value for "organic" or "natural" search engine optimization are those most likely to be used by prospective customers in their search engines. Good choices will cause the site to rank higher in search engine results.

For large websites covering many products or many topics, a single home page cannot be optimized for every topic and still be relevant to all. A different approach is needed, a landing page that will not convert a visitor directly. A "hub" page is optimized for more generic, less targeted keyword phrases that have naturally a lower conversion rate than more-specific search terms. Hub landing pages serve as a "mini portal" within a site – the site establishes a number of virtual home pages, each for a broader topic.

There are two types of landing page, reference and transactional.

A reference landing page presents information that is relevant to the visitor. These can display text, images, dynamic compilations of relevant links, or other elements. Reference landing pages are effective if they meet the objectives of their publishers, which may be associations, organizations or public service entities. For many reference landing pages, effectiveness can be measured by the revenue value of the advertising that is displayed on them.

A special type of 'reference landing page' is the 'webvert', the marketing goal focuses on lead generation and interaction with the visitor. A webvert is not 'transactional' in nature. A webvert is a reference based, ethical landing page. The webverts consists of an advert, deigned on the AIDA principle. The traffic is driven from 

Google Adwords and is designed for two specific marketing tactics;

1) To attain high Google Adwords landing page quality scores, the benefit being any Adwords campaign costs are minimized.

2) The webvert has a clear call to action, usually a reply form.

The visitor traffic is immediate as the webvert relies on Google advertising to drive visitors to the webvert.

A transactional landing page seeks to persuade a visitor to complete a transaction such as filling out a form or interacting with advertisements or other objects on the landing page, with the goal being the immediate or eventual sale of a product or service. If information is to be captured, the page will usually withhold information until some minimal amount of visitor information is provided, typically an email address and perhaps a name and telephone number as well – enough to "capture the lead" and add the prospect to a mailing list.

A visitor taking the desired action on a transactional landing page is referred to as a conversion. The efficiency or quality of the landing page can be measured by its conversion rate, the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action. Since the economics of many online marketing programs are determined by the conversion rate, marketers constantly test alternatives and improvements to their landing pages. Some of the testing methods used are A/B testing and multivariate testing.

In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

In pay per click (PPC) campaigns, the landing page will also be customized to measure the effectiveness of different advertisements. By adding a parameter to the linking URL, marketers can measure advertisement effectiveness based on relative click-through rates.

7 Reasons You Create Landing Pages Specifically for Your Incoming Email or Social Media Links

Why is it so important to create a special Web page for the e-mail reader to visit? Why can't you simply send the prospect to your home page and make the offer a clickable item there?

Well, first of all, if you dump potential customers onto your home page, they could get lost. They could have trouble finding your offer and might give up. Or they might see something else of interest on your site and click away to that. Hey. You don't want them randomly browsing your site. You want them to respond to your specific offer!

The bottom line? When you send the reader to a landing page, you're in control. Which is where a direct response writer always wants to be.

Exactly what should you do on your landing page? Keep reading and I'll share a few ideas with you.

1. Thank the reader for responding.
You can begin your landing page with a brief headline like: "Thanks so much for responding to the e-mail we recently sent you!" This maintains continuity of communication. When they get to the landing page and see this message, they know they're in the right place and that they're at a special page created just for them.

2. Capture crucial data.
The whole idea of lead generation is to get people to raise their hands and indicate some level of interest, however modest. When they identify themselves, by responding to your offer, they enter the sales funnel. Then, you begin the job of converting prospects into buyers. This means that before they get to download your White Paper, your demo, or whatever, they must provide some information about themselves. Beginners think that you should let people take advantage of the offer without having to provide the info you're after. Wrong!

3. Don't ask too much of them.
Ask for the minimum information you need. Maybe name, title, company, and e-mail address. The fact you need to remember is that the more information you ask for, the more you'll turn people off. Never ask people, at this stage, when they're planning to make a purchase or what their budget is. Way too pushy!

4. Provide a promise of privacy and make your policy clear.
For good reason, prospects are reluctant to give up personal information. They know all too well that if they're not careful they may get an e-mail telling them that they're eligible for a share of a Nigerian prince's estate. Have a good privacy policy and make it crystal clear!

5. Keep the copy short.
The landing page is not the place to write a novel. Thank them. Convince them that their data will be kept private. Thank them again. Let them click to the download. Get out.

6. Use different landing pages to test different offers and creative treatments.
You can test variables by sending prospects to unique landing pages. Just measure the click through rate and you'll find out fast what works best. E-mail is much underused as a testing medium.

7. Don't forget to follow up.
After people take advantage of the offer on your landing page, work those leads! You should have follow-up messages ready to roll automatically. The whole idea of lead generation is to capture contact data and then press ahead with e-mail, postal mail, telemarketing, whatever. Failing to follow up aggressively is a big (and common) mistake!

The take-away message? Creating a great e-mail is crucial, but so is providing a landing page that does its job . . . getting the crucial data you need to begin an ongoing marketing effort.