Posts in the "General" Category

  • Slow Site Performance can hurt Google Page Rankings

    General

    Google has just announced that the speed / performance of a website will not be factored into the search ranking position. While the relevancy score will still be the main ranking factor, attention should definitely be given to ensuring that your websites are performing well.

    You can verify how your site is performing via your Webmaster tools, under Labs, Site performance – with the key threshold being 1.5 seconds as the determining factor in establishing if your site is a fast or slow performing site.

    Google has made a tool available for establishing site performance and providing recommendations as to how to improve this. This tool hooks natively into Firefox (3.5 and above), and you can download this from their code.google.com site at; http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

    Here’s Google’s official video introducing this;

    How can I improve my Website Performance?

    While good coding practices will definitely help improve page load times, some additional steps webmasters can take to speed this up is to remove any references to non-local domain hosted code. As a common example of this, those people using the default Google analytics code which refers to the ga.js file on the google-analytics.com domain may wish to create a local copy of this and reference it there instead.

    Another quick-win is to enable gzip page compression on your site. The simplest way to do this is to add the following into your .htaccess file under your website’s root directory;

    php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler

    Alternatively, add the following code to the header and footer of your site to do the same via PHP code;

    // In the head:
ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”);
// At the bottom:
ob_end_flush();

    You can then check whether this is working successfully or not by entering the URL into the following site;

    http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

    It may also be worth reviewing WHERE you are hosting your website from. While hosting abroad (in the US for instance) will save you a lot of money in the short term, the page load response times will typically then also include up to a 2.5ms lag. This in turn will impact significantly to your site site performance and now also consequently on your page rank which will ultimately mean less traffic and less sales through your site.

    Performance aspects aside, it is also important to note that your site will also not rank for geographic specific “regional searches” (ie; pages within Australia) if your site is not hosted on a server recognised as having an IP address local to that region. To check where your website is being hosted, you can use free online services such as;

    http://network-tools.com/

    … simply enter in the domain name or IP, select Network Lookup, and hit GO!

    Good luck! :)

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  • Google Website Submission Secrets

    Email Marketing

    I’ve just launched my email subscription service along with my very first ebook on correct Google Website Submissions! My email subscription services will give you all my latest blog posts sent directly to your inbox, as well as all my hottest Internet Marketing tips, starting with my Google Website Submissions eBook which will show you how to get your website indexed and listed almost immediately with Google – up to 3 month’s sooner than if you just submit via conventional methods!

    So let’s recap what I’ve done in the past 1.5 months;

    1. I’ve completely repositioned my company with a focus on Internet Marketing, including a change of company name (updated with ASIC, Office of Fair Trade and my GITC accreditation). I’ve commissioned the creation of a new logo and business card design (through oDesk) and have updated all my existing company documentation to reflect this new name and logo (Invoice templates, Terms and Conditions, Acceptable Use policy and Privacy Policy etc). The website design I’ve mind-mapped out, however haven’t put together the content for this yet.

    2. Using the online email management service aWeber, I have fully integration my website so that my subscribers can automatically be emailed with my latest blog posts, news and updates. I was also able to automate the posting of updates to my Twitter account by using my Blog website’s RSS feed (for those of you who are following me there) through this aWeber service also.

    By adding a few free plug-ins provided by the Social Media networks Facebook and MySpace, I’ve also integrated my Internet Marketing Millionaire blog and Twitter feeds directly into my status and wall updates, so any update against any of my Social Media Marketing sites will update across the rest of my Social Media networks!

    Finally, within my Internet Marketing YouTube channel I was also able to directly back-link my video posts into my Facebook and Twitter… so all in all, I’d safely say this all makes for a fairly comprehensive Social Media Marketing setup!

    3. I’ve completed my first eBook on Google Website Submission Secrets! The creation of this wasn’t overly difficult; the eBook was written in Microsoft Word, then converted into PDF. The real magic happened with the creation of the eBook cover! Initially pursuing this via oDesk (outsourcing this work to a graphics developer), this was going to cost me around $50-$70. Thinking this was a bit much for a simple eBook cover, I opted to try and learn to do this myself in Photoshop with the help of some YouTube training videos. An hour later, I completed a bit of a sad looking box shaped object with some reflections and a dodgy shadow – surely there has to be a better way. And there is; Photoshop Action Scripts!! If you don’t know what this is, I completely recommend Googling this to learn more. Long story short, with these Photoshop action scripts, I’m able to save myself $50-70 per eBook cover design, and can now quite literally create myself an eBook cover in less than 2 minutes by myself! One awesome (commercially available) package which I’ve discovered in my travels is Cover Action Pro.

    4. Aside from my immediate Internet Marketing aspirations (Adwords marketing of Affiliate products, followed by Back-ending with email offers to sales increase conversion and provide additional pre-sale incentives, then ultimately the creation of my own Information Products), I have also been working on a few larger scale online service websites. I’ll go into more detail on these as they develop, however I’ve found that an excellent place to start with new site concepts is to mind map these out in detail first. One excellent software package which allows me to quickly brain dump ideas is iMindMap. Using this software I was able to quickly and easily spec out the site structures of my new company website, two more outlines for future eBooks I’m working on, as well as one of my new online service sites!

    5. I’ve also commissioned and received delivery of my first eBook, including 7 unique articles on a subject within a niche market I’ve chosen to explore. I think one of the most crucial mental hurdles toward Internet Marketing is not to try and do everything yourself. This was something I really struggled with initially, however as an aspiring Internet Marketer, I think it’s more career limiting to try and force yourself into doing all the tasks you don’t enjoy doing (ie; writing all your own eBooks, Sales letters and Articles etc) as you will VERY quickly lose momentum and interest after your first few product releases – especially if they’re not immediately successful.

    So the solution is simple; outsource all the tasks you don’t enjoy so you can free up your time to focus on the thing you do enjoy! For myself, this meant leaving the sales copy writing, eBook writing and articles to those people who are passionate about and enjoy writing within these mediums. The best part about this also, is that by outsourcing these tasks via such online services such as eLance, RentaCoder and (my personal favourite) oDesk, you can often find highly qualified and experienced industry professionals within these areas for VERY affordable prices. An average eBook for instance might cost anywhere between $80USD to $150USD to write – which (financial costs aside) is really awesome when you consider the opportunity cost of having spent all that time writing this book yourself, when you could have been focusing on the Internet Marketing of your product instead!

    To put this in context; all the above was achieved purely in my “spare time”. I work on average a 45 hour week at my place of full-time employment (the SQL DBA job). I go to my martial arts training 2-3 nights a week, and I spend the majority of my weekends with my girlfriend. Without leveraging my time through effective outsourcing, there would be NO WAY I could have achieved all the above on my own.

    My next post (hopefully shorter in length and a little more frequent in update than the monthly posts so far) will be on Niche Market Research; Finding Niches, Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis.

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  • The Internet Marketing Formula

    Affiliate Marketing

    The formula for Internet Marketing is pretty straight forward. Whether you’re promoting your own product or that of an affiliate, your online marketing campaign should basically go along the lines of the following, in approximately the following order for development;

    1. Identify the Niche Market or Product to Promote
    2. Do your Keyword Research
    3. Create your squeeze Page with an “ethical bribe” to collect your visitors email details
    4. Then on the final product page, deliver a compelling sales letter to complete the sale.

    Sounds simple enough right? Well, more or less. Probably the most complicated component of this entire process is the initial learning curve! (1) There are literally thousands of Niche markets out there; everything from the mainstream online dating and latest miracle fat cures through to the more specific (and crazily enough, proven to be lucrative) niches of tatoo design, how to build chicken coops and pumpkin carving! (2) The next step is Keyword research; this typically follows a fairly specific criteria also in order to establish the correct long tailed keywords pertaining to that specific niche which generate enough traffic per month without excessive competition. Your keyword research will play an integral role in both your Google Adwords campaign and site’s search engine optimisation (which feeds back into your page rank and ultimately cost-per-click overhead).

    (3) Your squeeze page (or “lead generation” page) requires a special mention as this is the component which is by far the most important in your online marketing promotion. Generally speaking, there is only a 1% conversion of people who hit your site that actually go through to complete a purchase. Through the giving away of something of value (an “ethical bribe”), in exchange for a visitor’s name and email, you are able to build a list of potential buyers within that niche market. As has been reiterated to me countless times by MANY of the Internet Marketers I have met and spoken to; THE MONEY IS IN THE LIST! … and I cannot emphasise this enough. Through effective back-ending, your online marketing campaign can potentially convert as high as 20% or even 50%, through email marketing directly to your niche-specific list. I’ll go into the specifics of settings this up in detail later on.

    (4) Finally there is the sales letter leading to the final product sale itself. When dealing with affiliate products, the affiliate themselves will more than likely already have a sales page in place for your to send your traffic to. This isn’t to say you’re completely at the disposal of the affiliate’s sales copy, as your preceeding squeeze page can (and should) also be used to further incentivise the sale through perhaps a post-sale bonus of sorts. If you’re promoting your own product (and I will step you through this process in later posts), then the creation of your own sales letter will be key to the success of your campaign, and unless you’re a professional sale copywriter, I would strongly recommend outsourcing this task.

    So you now have a brief outline of the Internet Marketing formula. In the following posts I’ll be going through the various components of this in more detail. I’ll also be opening up my own newsletter shortly which will give you additional how-to’s and guides on such things as correct website submission techniques to search engines, search engine optimisation tips as well as guides on information production creation, setting up your own payment gateway and more advanced guides on back-link generation techniques!

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