We’re going to be looking at the process of creating a web site and how to make money online with your site. We’ll take you through the steps of choosing a domain name, web site hosting, designing your pages with web site templates, adding content and making money online with google adsense and affiliate programs.

The success of your online business relies on you making sales, actually selling your product or service to paying customers. The more the better. To get those sales you need to communicate well with your potential customers and make a good sales pitch. What you say and how you say it are therefore very important and can make the difference between your business succeeding or failing.

When you sell your products and services online, you communicate largely through text. What you say in that text directly influences the customer’s decision to either buy or not buy your product, in the same way that a real-world sales conversation would. Your potential customer wants to hear interesting and important information that will help them make that decision. That decision begins from the moment they arrive at your website.

Lets imagine you are looking to buy a particular product. You learn that the product is available on two different websites. You visit each site and read their text.

This is what Site A says to you in effect:

let us tell you about us, here’s some very basic product details we feel we should give you, here’s an inadequate photo of the product we had lying around, this is why we are in business and why we think we are great, yeah we know we’ve made it difficult for you to use our site. We didn’t want to make the effort to find out what our customers want, this is where we are located (usually accompanied by a picture of their building).

Site B says:

yes we sell the product you are looking for. here it is…, let us tell you all about it, here’s some good reasons why you should buy it immediately, here’s some good reasons why you should buy from us (and not our competitors), Its easy for you to buy from us. Just do this…, Let us know if we can serve you better or answer any questions you may have.

Which one is going to get the sale? Obviously Site B will get the sale. Why? Because they clearly show they understand their customers. They:

Focus on their customers! Focus on their needs! Focus on their priorities!

They provide information that is useful to you in making your buying decision. They are focused on you the customer, not themselves. Their text is all about “you”. They work hard to ensure all this and demonstrate it on their website. They make it very easy to interact with them and that also gives you the impression they will be very easy to deal with too.

Site A, on the otherhand, may indeed have some useful information on their webpage but its not there in quantity and for your benefit. It can of course be useful to know where a company is located. But, if they are going on about it or its the first thing you see on arrival, its more likely there to prop-up their over inflated ego and demonstrate how successful they think they are. Their focus is directed entirely on themselves. You are not their number 1 priority, they are! Don’t they realise that customers can read between the lines and spot this easily?

In addition to focusing on their customers, there’s also something else that Site B does very well. Its not as easy to spot but has a dramatic effect on their sales. Its the way they deliver their information. They know its vital to keep your attention and interest. If they lose it for a second they may lose it forever.

They’ve noticed that other sites write paragraphs of text that grab your interest in one sentence and lose it in the next, because the information provided is not relevant or important to you at that point. It should either be removed or replaced. So they have made a conscious effort to hold your interest at all times throughout a paragraph or piece of text. Their paragraphs say exactly what you want to know and in the order you want to know it. They hold your interest throughout with useful and valuable information. They don’t tolerate any irrelevant or unimportant information whatsoever.

This is the ideal situation for your company to be in. To have customers who are keen to listen to what you have to say and trust what you say. They know you are focused on them, their needs and their priorities. They are far more likely to listen to your recommendations and make purchases based on them. You will build stronger, equally beneficial and more rewarding relationships with them. Those relationships will be hard to break by your competitors, especially if you keep that focus and continuously improve your offers, products and service.

Questions to ask?

Are you focused on your customers? Are you providing the right information at the right times? Do you keep their attention and interest at all times? Do you distract them at anytime? Are you getting maximum sales from your website?

Action to take on your website:

Concentrate on selling more products. Concentrate on selling them well. Remove any distracting, confusing or irelevant text. Try to keep the readers interest continuously.

Remember: Focus on your customers! Focus on their needs! Focus on their priorities!

Good luck!

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All websites have a homepage. It is the most important page of your site. It acts as the main gateway to the entire site. Most of your prospective customers will enter through it. Its vital to get it right. You dont want them to just turn around and go away again.

Take a moment to clear your mind. Now go and look at your homepage and take a minute to evaluate it. Does it work for your prospective customers?

Most will arrive at your homepage and quickly scan through the content. If they are interested in what they read and see they’ll typically decide to click on a link that takes them to another page where they’ll find more information. As they make that decision they’ll be asking things like:

What do they do? Do they look professional? Whats in it for me? Do i have the problem they describe? Are they talking directly to me? How can i get it?

Alternatively, if the homepage hasnt interested them immediately then they’ll leave just as quickly as they arrived, unlikely to return.

Your homepage is the gateway to your website and plays a critical part in the prospects visit. First impressions count. The success of your site depends on your homepage. Now, before we look at what a homepage should be, lets look at what it shouldnt be.

It should not be a false homepage requiring you to click a link to get to the real homepage. It shouldnt be a page that fails to direct the prospect to further action. It shouldnt contain any content that doesnt serve an immediate and clear purpose. It should never read like a dull brochure, that does nothing to motivate prospects to seek more information or buy immediately.

What a homepage should be. It should have a clear message. It should be a dynamic page that instantly conveys a sense of what you do, how you do it, who you are, how you do business, etc. It should start to describe the direct benefits that prospective customers get by buying your product or service. It should create prospect interest and make them eager to find out more. It should provide direction and clearly marked links to get them there. It should focus entirely on serving the needs of your prospective customers and removing their anxieties.

The purpose of your website is to sell your products and services to your prospects. To be effective your homepage must meet the needs of your prospects exactly and provide answers to their questions. To do this you must know what your prospects want and how they want it. If you dont already know, find out. Ask them!

Also, spend some time looking at other homepages learning what works and what doesnt. Are there features and styles that you could adopt on your site?

Once you have these answers design your entire homepage around them. Spend some time getting it right and both you and your prospects will benefit. Dont settle for second best unless you want your website to fail as a result of being ineffective.

When you’ve done it. Take a moment to clear your mind. Now go and look at your homepage once again and take a minute to re-evaluate it. Does it work for your prospective customers now?

Good luck!

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help. Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

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Ahhh! The age old question, how can I increase the traffic to my website, without paying for advertising?

Well, the sad fact is, they simply won’t just turn up to your website, without you doing something to get them there!

So, here are 5 free ways to increase your traffic:

1. Search Engines.

This has to be number one but it is getting increasingly difficult to get a good position in the top 10 search engines. So, how do you gain a good position? Well first of all, whatever you do, for goodness sake don’t use a free submission service that will automatically submit your site to the top 1000+ search engines. Don’t expect to get a good position (if any). Just focus on the top ten search engines. Primarily, they look for:

- Link Popularity. This is the number of sites that have a link to your site. You can increase this by contacting other related websites and ask them to link to your site.

- Keywords. Your keywords are placed in the tags of your web pages. When someone types a word into a search engine, your keywords are what the search engine looks for to see if your site is relevant to the search. Have a look at your competitors keywords, don’t copy them but brainstorm a little and try to think of other words or phrases people might be looking for, that are relevant to your site. A good site to look for popular keywords searches is: http://www.wordtracker.com

- Keyword Rich Pages. These are pages which provide good content and in which a particular keyword is repeated a number of times. So that the page gets a top ranking for that keyword.

2. Ask For Links. Search one of the top engines for sites which would be a suitable link to your site. Then send a personalized e-mail to the webmaster of those sites and ask them to link to your site. Some of them, may ask for a reciprocal link, which means you must link to their site and in return they will link to your site. You’ll be surprised how many links you can quickly set up. To take this one step further, visit: http://www.linkpopularity.com Here you can find out, how many links a particular site has. So, just enter in the URL of one of your competitors and link popularity will give you a list of all the sites that link to them. Then visit these sites and request a link. If they link to your competitors, then you’ll have a high chance of them linking to you.

3. Write Articles. This is a very overlooked way to generate lots of traffic. You simply write an article on a related subject to your website. Include a resource box at the end of the article, which contains a link to your website. Then send the article to article announcement sites. Here, ezine owners visit and simply copy your article and send it out in their ezines. Just think for a minute about how quickly your website URL can be placed in front of thousands of people. Don’t under-estimate the power of this strategy. (You’re reading this article, are’nt you? ;-] )

4. Signature File. You should include a signature file on any e-mails that you send out. This is basically a short paragraph at the end of your e-mails that includes your name, e-mail address and a link to your website.

Obviously, there are many variations to signature files. You could advertise a report, website or your newsletter.

5. Newsgroups, Forums and Discussion Boards. To use this technique, you simply hang out in related newsgroups, forums and discussion boards. Listen to what people are talking about, join in on discussions, answer any questions you can. Basically, try to help people as much as you can. Don’t directly advertise your business though because you will be banned by the group. However, you are allowed to include your signature file in your correspondance. Again, don’t just ignore this technique. It is an easy way to bring in more traffic.

It is often easy to overlook the simple ways to generate more traffic.

A high amount of traffic will not come overnight but use these techniques consistently and you simply cannot fail to bring in those hard to find surfers!

Have Fun.

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help. Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Evan, Obijiofor

Ever been unhappy with the results of your first search attempt on BING?
They’re on the case as you read this.

It seems that BING has found that 45% of searchers who search
on their engine either immediately do another search
dissatisfied maybe with their initial results,
or they end up quitting the page all together.

From BING’s BLOG:
“We at Bing are continually improving the performance of autosuggest to reduce these problems. In fact, we recently incorporated breaking news and hot trending queries within autosuggest. Updated every 15 minutes, trending queries balance timeliness and relevance to connect you with the most prominent or topical events happening now.”

With search engines incorporating the newest trends,
and latest news stories in their search result algorithms -
keeping your website updated with new and fresh content
is becoming more and more important.

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help.  Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, autosuggest, bing

You know it’s really funny that as a webmaster you spend alot of your time (maybe?) optimizing your pages to rank well in the search engines to bring in good targeted traffic. Your goal, for the most part, is to be paid in full by a nice position on the first page of most search engines.

You know there are more search engines out there besides Google, but let’s face it – it’s the biggest, so you hope to catch it’s attention in any way you can as a webmaster.  All other search engines are just cherries on top of the Ice Cream Sunday (or cake if you prefer). Plenty of us think in this manner.

Well… while I was working hard on a backlink campaign for one of my clients tonight it hit me.  This Google Local Business Listing  thing is really going to have to be included as a marketing strategy for my clients. I mean to say that as of right now there are businesses out there that know absolutely nothing about Search Engine Optimization, and yet they are given a top “A through E” rank on Google maps for local search terms.  Of course we all know that the top 3 listings tend to get most of the clickthroughs. Most of these listings aren’t even put together very well, but they rank incredibly high nonetheless.

Since I tend to deal with more local business websites anyway this has now become a major goal of mine.  I want my clients to be FIRST in that directory for the given local search term that we deem profitable.  Think about it. When is the last time you asked yourself…. “Now where did I put that Yellow Pages Phone Book?”.

Bottom line… Google Local Business Listings IS the new “phone book directory”. What is more powerful is the fact that if one were to optimize their business listing correctly they would have the opportunity to dominate any major city without even needing as much effort as you would need if you were going for say a #1 Position building thousands of backlinks (in some cases – not all).

Not saying we should ditch our SEO efforts to only focus on local search terms, but we should certainly not overlook its potential for highly targeted visitors either.

The “Rank A Listing” is our new “#1 Position” to shoot for if you are a website that offers local services.

Just my thoughts.

=D

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help.  Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, google, google local business results, link strategies

In case you hadn’t noticed every now and again you will see ten businesses in your area convenintly placed at the top of your search results by Google. Sometimes they are helpful, and other times not so much. Like seraching for “carribean beaches”, and getting businesses located on “Carrabean St.” as your top results.

But this brings me to my point. Everyone is so crazy about the right keywords for ones website that if  they maybe took a step back there can be a killing made by going after local search terms. For example, if you are a painting company why not invest the time to see which cities in your area have the highest search activity, and the create pages that focus on those areas – fully optimized of course.

It could be a lot smarter than going after broader search terms where you’ll find the bigger fish swimming.

Here is an interesting case study that can break this down for you even better.

http://www.seobook.com/local-seo-case-study

Until then give local SEO some thought it just could pay off for you.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, google, page optimization

A webmasters worst nightmare is to do all the necessary steps to ensure that ones site is reputable on the internet with quality linking campaigns, fresh helpful content for end users, and Google page rank that would make Google proud only to find that all of your hard work is being compromised by a sneaky hacker who steps in and steals most or all of your traffic.

I was suspicious that one of my own websites was hacked when I noticed a sharp dip in visitors. Thankfully it was only temporary, but for those of you who need some advice on how to see if you have been a victim of a hacking read on. Here are a few tips.

FIRST RUN YOUR WEBSITE THROUGH THIS HELPFUL CHECKER:
http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com

Of course you would replace my website domain with your own.

1.  The pages indexed by search engines suddenly drop by a significant amount.
Now we all know that our pages indexed fluctuate quite a bit, but if you notice hundreds, or perhaps
thousands of your pages going up in smoke. Start worrying.

2. A severe drop in visitors.
This would likely be due to Google “de-indexing” the hacked pages.

3. Google webmaster tools showing weird pages.
If you see that Google has pages indexed called “Male Enhancement For Less”
for your website, and your site has absolutely nothing to do with such a product/service….
Take Action ASAP!

4. Your website shows results for black list searches.
If you do a “site:www.yourdomain.com   viagra” search and Google shows page results for that search,
but your website doesn’t reference viagra (or any other black listed searches) at all on any of your pages….
You have a problem.

So what do you do to fix the problem. I have found a great blog post that outlines some handy
steps to help you give those hackers the boot. Read more here towards the end of that post.

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help.  Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Atlanta Website Design Advice

Every webmaster always has getting faster page loads in the back of their minds when they are tending to their websites right? Most say that the average web surfer has the attention span of a fruit fly. In some cases surfers are so used to fast surfing that if they get to a page that is slower than the average it actually pains them to be patient enough to wait for the page to load. I guess we have been fully conditioned to expect speed when it comes to the internet.

The worst thing that can happen to you as a webmaster is to have a website where your visitors are leaving due to the page loading to slow. So our friends at Google have yet again come to the rescue. In case you haven’t noticed there is a new tool called the “Page Speed” tool (very creative right?) in your Webmaster Tools account.

You’ll find it in the “Labs” section in the “Webmaster Tools”

So what will this little widget do for you?

- It will check your overall page’s loading time with a visual representation of how the page has been loading all this time.

- Selects the pages that are giving problems. So you know which to focus on.

– Offers ways to improve those pages that are loading slow on your site.

Bottom line it will compare your website to standard page loading times, and then offer help to you in improving your pages. A faster page load after all will equal a happy web surfer experience which is Google’s goal at the end of the day anyway. It’s time to get those pages faster!

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help.  Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, google, page optimization

As a webmaster I am always trying to keep up to date on the ways to keep my websites, and the websites of my clients as high on the search engine ladder as possible. So I was quite surprised when I came across a test ran by one of my favorite blog sites (www.seomoz.org) that proved that links with the “Nofollow” attribute may indeed carry more weight than Google leads us to believe.

What they did in a very clever nutshell…

They tested 5 popular methods of PageRank sculpting which included:

Rel=‘nofollow’ - The standard mechanism for nofollowing a link. <a href=’http://www.example.com’ rel=‘nofollow’>example</a>

Link Consolidation – Consolidating low priority pages. You can read more about link consolidation here.

Iframe - Include a standard link in an iframe that is blocked via robots.txt or meta robots so engines can’t follow it.

Javascript – An external Javascript file (blocked from robots) that inserts links into divs when the page renders.

Control Case – Null test with standard links.

They then built 5 websites similar in structure, but unique in content of course.  Each website utilized the methods of PageRank sculpting listed above. They then duplicated this 8 times over, and let it run for 2 months. Any takers as to what the actual results were?

Find out below. The results of their experiment may have you scratching your head…lol

TEST RESULTS

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help.  Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, google, link strategies, pagerank

Have you ever wished that your Google results had twitter updates in them?

Well don’t count the possibility out just yet.  Word is Google has already been testing ways to incorporate having tweets show up in their search results. Example would be:  Go to Google and search for “Avatar” the movie, and all of a sudden you would have tweets from the actors in the film, or advertising tweets from movie theaters in the Atlanta area.

Sounds like an awesome idea right?

Well there is a dark side to all of this. One of which would be spammers would have a field day. There are no safe guards in place for Google to be able to have a handle over all the spammers that would open their thousands of Tweet accounts to promote Viagra, and magically have their Tweets appear as number 1 on the search engines. Oh…did I say search “engines”…yea both BING and YAHOO are in a race to incorporate this into their search results as well.

So maybe having a twitter account might not be so bad after all if you are a small business website owner. If you are destined to achieve results such as landing top placement on the search engines. Fortune here we come!!

You can read more here:

Google may increase potential for libel by including Tweets in search results

Google Enables Real Time Spam and More

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help.  Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, google, twitter