My Online Business Journey

2009 In Review & 2010 Goals

As we say good bye to 2009, and look ahead to 2010, I am looking at what I did right in this past year, what I didn’t accomplish, and what I want to do in the New Year.

One of the best things I did in 2009 was to re-focus: I sold a few sites that no longer fit my long term plans, and finally took action on my desire to blog about my internet journey and started this very blog.

There are places where I took steps in the right direction, but I need to make a better effort to take full advantage, which is what I’ll be doing in 2010: twitter, list building (and nurturing), etc.

Setting goals is easy: working consistently towards achieving them is not. So, my main goal for the New Year is to be more consistent towards achieving these goals…

Blogging Regularly

This is one of my biggest struggles, and not because I don’t know what to write about, but because I panic if someone else posted similar content, and then struggle to make myself post mine anyway. I’ll have to work hard on this one, but I am sure I’ll make it happen.

Building Links

Again, I know exactly how do get links, but it’s a matter of doing it consistently. In the past couple of months I learned to value of guest blogging for link building, as well as concentrated effort to build links to a specific blog post. Seeing those results encourages me to continue even when it feels like a lot of work.

Get Back Into PPC

I used to do very well with PPC a while ago, but some life circumstances made it hard to do it properly for the past 2 years. I am planning to revisit the Campaign Blasts method and get back into it.

Case Studies

2010 will also be the year of doing case studies. After all, my blog is about my online journey, and I’d like to share with you, my readers how I do things and the results I get. That way, we can all learn from my mistakes and victories.

I am very excited about the New Year! I feel good about my plans, and I am encouraged to succeed, especially with the help of my mastermind group.

Have you made plans for the upcoming year? Feel free to share them below.

12/28/2009 by Adriana | Comments Off

Website Traffic

How to Increase Traffic to Your Website

So you have just successfully launched your website and you are feeling extremely good about yourself for such an achievement. Of course, you have just jumped one hurdle (building your website) and are now moving towards the next one which is actually getting internet users to view your website daily. How many visitors would you like to get to your site daily? 100? 500? 100? More? Let’s see how you can increase traffic to your website.

There are several effective ways to increase traffic flow to your website: PPC, article marketing, video, social media, etc.

Increase Traffic With PPC

Many website owners don’t use PPC at all for fear of costing too much. But if you really think about it, PPC could actually save you lots of time and money. How, you may ask? With PPC you can test niches easily without wasting time on the other traffic building methods, only to find out that your pages don’t convert, or the keywords/key phrases you chose are not buying phrases.

Set up a PPC campaign that is very specific to your key phrase, and send a few hundred visitors to that page: then assess if the phrase you chose is profitable. If so, go on to some of the next traffic generation methods.

How Article Marketing Can Boost Your Traffic

Everyone knows about article marketing, yet so many ignore its benefits. Try this: write one article a day for the next 3 months and submit it to the top 5 article directories. Then take a look at how your traffic improved. I am sure you’ll see it’s an activity worth taking the time for. Of course, make sure your articles have a great call to action, or you’ll waste your time. Forget about writing your entire life story in the bio: be short and to the point and offer something related to your article that the reader can’t ignore.

If you want to get even more out of your article writing, why not re-purpose your articles? You could create short videos, pod-casts, and even mini eBooks to give away.

Video Traffic

Another excellent method of driving traffic to your site is creating video. If you have an ecommerce site, you can create product review videos. If you sell software, you can create a video about how to use it, and if you have an info product, you can create a video with all the benefits you’ll get from reading the eBook.

Of course, there are the fun videos that serve to endear YOU to your audience, and Lynn Terry does this beautifully with her mail opening videos. If you can come up with your own “get to know me” fun video, take that opportunity!

Social Media Traffic

There are lots visitors to be had from the social media: from twitter to Digg, Squidoo and Hubpages, and everything else in between. Of course, you can’t just throw a link on twitter and hope to get a lot of visitors: you need to build relationships, participate in discussions, be helpful, etc.

What is YOUR best traffic generation method?

12/20/2009 by Adriana | 3 Comments

Free Niche Research

Free Niche Research: Memory Foam Mattress

This week’s niche was inspired by last week’s: Sleigh Beds. I loved the novelty of that niche, and continued to research in that general topic and found a few gems, including today’s niche: Memory Foam Mattress.

You’ll love the AdSense payouts on this one!

Top 10 Highest Paying Keywords(from the Google keyword tool)

double memory foam mattress $6.33

memory foam mattress king size $5.97

memory foam mattress toppers $5.87

memory foam mattress overlay $5.78

cheap memory foam mattress $5.74

foam mattress memory $5.72

memory foam mattress $5.72

single memory foam mattress $5.72

queen size memory foam mattress $5.62

memory foam mattress sale $5.52

Top 10 Most Searched Keywords(all phrases are exact matches in Google)

memory foam mattress 74,000

memory foam mattress topper 49,500

memory foam mattress pad 18,100

memory foam mattresses 8,100

memory foam mattress toppers 6,600

memory foam mattress queen 4,400

memory foam mattress reviews 4,400

memory foam mattress pads 3,600

king memory foam mattress 2,900

memory foam mattress cover 2,900

twin memory foam mattress 2,900

Resources

wikipedia.org has some information, but I think the best information for this niche will be information about the issues a memory foam mattress helps with: a good night’s sleep, chronic sleep disorders, arthritis, fibromialgya, etc.

Possible Affiliate Programs

Amazon.com has lots of memory foam mattress, as well as other related products (books about good sleep, relaxation techniques, exercise equipment, etc.)

CJ.com has several merchants offering sleigh beds. Here are a couple: Hammacher Schlemmer and StacksAndStacks.

Monetization Suggestions

Amazing AdSense payout for most key phrases in this niche.

Of course, an affiliate store for memory foam mattress, with a blog attached that gives information about the above issues a foam mattress can solve. While people may be looking for information on how to get better sleep, or how to deal with arthritis pain, etc., you can add links to specific pages about these great mattresses that woudl ease their pain, make them sleep like a baby, etc. Excellent way to mix the high paying AdSense with affiliate offers.

Here are some domains available now for this niche:

MemoryFoamMattressTopper.biz gets 49K exact searches a month: WOW!

MemoryFoamMattressToppers.biz gets 6K exact searches a month

MemoryFoamMattressPad.biz gets 18K exact searches a month.

MemoryFoamMattresses.biz get 8K exact searches a month

MemoryFoamMattressCover.com, .net, .org & .biz are all available, and the phrase gets 2900 exact searches/month.

QueenSizeMemoryFoamMattress.org & .biz with 1600 exact searches monthly.

ViscoElasticMemoryFoamMattress.net, .org & .biz with 1600 exact searches monthly.

ViscoElasticMemoryFoamMattressTopper.net, .org, .biz & .info with 1600 exact searches monthly.

What are you waiting for? Go build a niche site!

12/18/2009 by Adriana | 3 Comments

How To

How To Create an Anchor Text Link

As simple as creating a text link is, it trips many marketers, when they need it most. A broken link is useless, even detrimental, so learning how to do it properly is important.

Text links are an effective way to drive traffic to your website or to internal web pages by linking to them in your content or from external pages. They’re usually referred to as a “link” or a “hyperlink”.

In many word processing programs, like MS Word, you can simply highlight the text you want to use to create the link and then click on the link icon in your toolbar. Once that pops up, you simply type or search for the appropriate page you want to link to and you’re good to go.

However, if you’re creating your links in a text document or using HTML to write your content, then you’ll need to know a few things.

First of all, by default, all links will appear as follows in all browsers:

* An unvisited link is underlined and blue
* A visited link is underlined and purple
* An active link is underlined and red

In order to write your own anchor links you’ll need to know some basic HTML. Here’s an example of what an anchor link would look like and what the various codes mean: <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”</a>

* The <a> tag opens an anchor and </a> closes the anchor
* href URL Specifies the destination of a link

So if I wanted to point someone to my Free Niche Research the code would be: <a href=”https://www.myonlinebusinessjourney.com/category/free-niche-research/”>Free Niche Research</a>

It’s pretty straight forward and easy to accomplish whether you’re doing the coding yourself or using a WSYWYG type interface. Regardless, anchor text links are a great way to link with your desired keyword phrases to specific pages in your content.

There are other things you can add to your anchor links:

* open your link in a new window: add target=”_blank” , so the above link ‘s code will look like this: <a target=”_blank” href=”https://www.myonlinebusinessjourney.com/category/free-niche-research/”>Free Niche Research</a>

* to change the link’s color, add style=“color: #CC0000”, where #CCoooo is a red color, and so my link above would have the following code: <a style=“color: #CC0000” href=”https://www.myonlinebusinessjourney.com/category/free-niche-research/”>Free Niche Research</a>, and it woudl look like this: Free Niche Research

* you can also add an HTML hyperlink title, like this: title=”describe your link here”, so my link above would look lie this with the added title tag: <a title=”check out these niches, already researched for you” href=”https://www.myonlinebusinessjourney.com/category/free-niche-research/”>Free Niche Research</a>

All of the above examples should be in one line (the width of the blog here is too narrow to include the entire line of code, so make sure you don’t have any hard breaks in the middle of your link code)

There are other, more advanced ways to modify your links, but the above should get you started. Make sure you format your anchor text links properly for maximum success.

12/18/2009 by Adriana | 1 Comment

How To

How To Choose Your Next Niche

It seems as though many of us struggle with picking out a good niche to concentrate on. Here are a few ideas of how to go about finding that elusive profitable niche you want for your next site:

Start by making a list of topics you are interested in and/or passionate about. Don’t rush this process, and don’t try to “think” to much. Just let your thoughts flow and write down everything that comes to mind: you’ll have time later to trim your list.

Once you have your list it’s time to see if there is a demand for the topics on your list. Head on over to the Google Keyword Tool or the Free Wordtracker Tool and do some keyword research. The Google tool give you monthly results, while the Wordtracker tool gives you daily results.

You are looking for topics with a good number of searches. What is a good number of searches? It depends: if the key phrase describes a broad topic, even if your phrase gets a few thousand searches a month, it may be hard to rank for that phrase, and the traffic may not be as qualified. But if the key phrase shows commercial intent, as few as 20-30 searches a day may be all you need.

For example, if I search for “bread machine” I get the following:

bread machine keyword research

As you see, there are 234 searches a day for that phrase, but I would rather go for one of the more specific phrases this search uncovered: Zojirushi bread machine, Welbilt bread machine, Oster bread machine, etc. These more targeted searches, while having less searches, show that the visitors know what they want. I’d probably dig deeper, and search for model numbers for those bread machines, and concentrate on those.

After you find the keywords you want to use, it’s time to research your competition. Go to Google and look at the top 5 sites: check to see how many back-links they have, how large and/or established their site is, how often they update it, etc. How easy/hard would be for you to acquire the same amount of links? Could you get better quality links? Could you do something different to stand out from the crowd? Will you be able to provide lots of content for your niche? If you can do those things, then you may have found your niche.

There is one other thing to check before you go buy your domain name: can you make money in this niche? Are there good affiliate programs for your chosen niche?

If you need a head start on the process of finding new niches, stop by here every Friday to see the new niche research for that week.

12/15/2009 by Adriana | Comments Off

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