When you’re starting a new business, it’s hard enough to know what you SHOULD be doing, much less what you SHOULDN’T.  And yet, even if you think you’re doing everything you’re supposed to, you may risk failure with common missteps that could be easily avoided if only you knew what to watch out for.  Luckily, you’re not reinventing the wheel here; plenty of other businesses have laid the groundwork for you and you can benefit from their trials.

Are You Experiencing This????

The only possible way to fall short is if you neglect to learn from those that have gone before.  So here are just a few of the most universal setbacks that you’ll certainly want to steer clear of when you open the doors to your new business venture.

1. An incomplete plan.  As any business owner (or recent business student) knows, you must have a comprehensive business plan in order to move forward with starting an enterprise.  There are many reasons for this, but the most important at the outset is to secure funding.  Without a solid plan that shows you have done the research and taken the steps to be successful, no lender in the world will give you the handout you need to get your business off the ground.  After all, they want their investment back at some point.  But keep in mind that this plan must be flexible.  Running a business is anything but static and you need to start with a plan that accounts for just about anything so that you are prepared when changes occur.
2. The wrong funding.  Most people generally assume that this means a lack of funding.  And this is definitely a problem for a lot of startups.  But considering how many potential sources of funding are out there, you have a lot of options to explore.  The bigger problem is business ventures that choose the wrong type of funding.  For example, you may have an incredible idea that comes with the possibility of rapid expansion.  This could attract the interest of a venture capital firm that is willing to give you millions in startup funds.  Most business owners would jump at the opportunity, but you should beware.  If you want the opportunity to grow with your business by making your own decisions, you should know that anyone willing to hand over that kind of capital is going to want a say in where it goes, so you could quickly find yourself strung up like a marionette at the whims of your financiers.
3. Bad location.  Surprisingly, this applies not only to brick-and-mortar operations, but also to online ventures.  While “real” world shops have to consider traffic and demographics (as well as the cost of a lease), those that operate online have other concerns related to their web space.  You need to ensure that your website is well hosted, meaning easy to find (a great domain name) and always available (no interruptions in service and the bandwidth to accommodate a growing user base).
4. Insufficient DIY.  There’s a lot you can do on your own to save money at the outset, so if you’re paying others to do everything, you are wasting money!  Of course, it’s even worse if you try to tackle jobs that you have not prepared for through education or training.  So take the time to gain the knowledge you need to do some tasks yourself, and hire people only when an expert hand is needed to get the job done.
5. Lack of branding.  Your business sign, logo, and advertising are all part of creating your brand image, but there’s a lot more to the concept, including how you comport yourself with customers and clients and what you give back to the community that supports you.  If you haven’t considered how your actions reflect upon your business then you could be creating a negative brand association without even realizing that you’ve engaged in branding yourself.

Evan Fischer is a freelance writer and part-time student at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.

Related articles

• Richard Branson on How to Avoid Common Startup Mistakes
• Do You Have What It Takes to Run a Startup?
• Top mistakes for small business startups

This week we welcome a guest blogger who will be talking about something that most of us will have in our minds especially when it comes to SEO optimization.

N.B for those of you who do not know what on page and off page optimization is let me briefly explain to you here:

On-Page Optimization: What you can do on your own website to improve its search engine rankings i.e title tags, meta tags, H1, H2, H3 tags, content, keywords etc…

Off-Page Optimization: What you can do “off-site” to improve your search engine rankings i.e social media submissions, submissions to feed directories, article directories, link wheels, guest posting etc..

I hope this article will make more sense after understanding these 2 terms correctly. Without further a do, I will introduce Jason Monroe to continue from here.

I’ve been asked several times lately whether on-page or off-page optimizing delivers better returns. One visitor to my blog expressed his annoyance that after spending a significant amount of time using SEOPressor to optimize his page, he saw little if any improvement in his SERP ranking.

Serious online marketers are fully aware of the importance of page optimization, but we all share the same limitation; the 24 hour day. With a set number of hours each day, and the occasional need to sleep and eat, we naturally will want to spend our working hours in the most productive manner.

This leads us to the question; where is our optimizing time more effectively spent; on-page or off-page? The answer is; it depends.

Bringing Attention to Yourself; Content vs Backlinks

Most of us have already picked up on a discouraging fact; Google is less interested in the content of the page than what other people think about the content of the page. Because even the best algorithms are not capable of evaluating an article as effectively as an 8th grader could, Google relies on others to read the content of a page and decide whether it’s worth the time to link back to it.

While backlinks play a critical role in where Google ranks your website, that role isn’t always a positive one. The quality of your backlinks, as well as their quantity, will affect your page’s Google ranking.

Whether your website markets time-share condos, posts reviews on electronics equipment or offers free car insurance quotes, it will benefit greatly if you develop backlinks to quality sites. This kind of work can be time consuming and a bit mind-numbing, but the Google juice produced by off-page optimization is well worth the time.

Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of social media, either. An article or webpage which has been “Liked” on Facebook, Tweeted about on Twitter, Dugg or Digged or StumbledUpon will automatically look good to Google because of what’s called the “trust factor”. Any time that one human refers another to your webpage, Google will respond by improving the ranking of that webpage.

If your objective is to rank well for the highly competitive keywords, then building quality backlinks, particularly through the use of relevant anchor text, is the fastest way to enjoy positive results.

On-Page Optimization by Accident

One of the results of the recent Panda upgrade is that article writers and webmasters will be required to produce higher quality pages if they want them to rank well. The top ranking webpages will need to be written for humans, not search engines, and they will need to contain usable information, not fluff.

The good news, though, is that when you produce quality content, one of the inadvertent results of your efforts will be a nicely optimized page. By aiming for quality content, you’ll naturally include some less competitive, long-tailed keywords which will be easier to rank well for. These long-tailed keyword phrases, by the way, will be the ones which your target audience will use during searches.

Two Areas Ripe For On-Page Optimization

Because it has to start somewhere, the Google algorithm will begin by looking at the beginning of your article, where your title and introductory paragraphs are, for the more competitive keywords. These are the places where your targeted keywords should be found.

The introductory paragraphs should also contain a concise description of the content of your article. Remember in the fourth grade when you learned how to write a topic sentence and an introductory paragraph? That is what the algorithm is looking for.

The algorithm also searches meta descriptions for information. This is another place to have your primary keyword on display, as well as secondary keywords and an article description. If you include the targeted keyword phrase in your H1 tag, this would also make the search engine’s job much easier.

You will get a chance to sell many more baseball gloves or refer more people to the ideal house painter if you’ve properly customized your page description and placed it where Google can easily find it.

Re-Setting Your Priorities

Having considered the information in this article, you probably now know the answer to our original question. Where is our optimizing time more effectively spent; on-page or off-page? You should really do both.

Regardless of whether your website exists to compare auto insurance quotes or educate the public about Japanese Tea Ceremonies, the best way to make it successful is to apply your optimization skills both on and off your webpages.

Off-page optimization gets all the press because it will help your overall ranking on a search results page. By building quality backlinks your entire site will rank better for the high competition keywords.

However, on-page optimization makes your page rank better for the long tail phrases. This alone won’t help your site rocket past About.com for your keyword, but it certainly helps, so on-page optimization shouldn’t be ignored, either.

What has your experience been? If you have some insight or an opinion about off-page or on-page optimization, we’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to use the comment box below.

About the Author:

Jason Monroe began his adventures as a football star through highschool and carried over his passion as a huge fan of the NFL. When he was busy researching football he could be found researching other topics of interested, which in fact is what led him to affiliate marketing. A young gun in the industry he has fresh ideas to bring to the table and motivation that shows in his writings.

Buildmyrank is another one of those link building services that puts it amongst the ranks of those article submission services like Linkvana. There are other services like Blog Blueprint that is also like Buildmyrank. Some of you might not have heard of Buildmyrank but my recent frustration with UAW has put me on the search for good article submission services to help with my backlinking efforts on my niche sites.

Buildmyrank is basically a service that consists of a network of almost 2000 domains hosted on multiple Class A, B and C IPs to help with your backlink building efforts. Here are some of the other features that you will see with this link building service:

BuildMyRank Features

BMR Dashboard

• Dofollow links back to your site
• All domains have different PR ranging from PR 0 to PR 6.
• Natural looking backlinks
• Links are permanent and will not be removed even if you choose not to be a member of Buildmyrank anymore.
• Create RSS Feeds from each content published which is them submitted to various Feed Aggregators
• Also includes automatic social-bookmarking for each content published to 75 social-bookmarking sites.
• Site Index monitoring – approximately 95-99% of content gets indexed by the search engines (which will then send a trackback to your site once it is indexed)
• Add Videos To your content (***BRAND NEW FEATURE***)

How To Use BuildMyRank?

BMR Write A Post

Buildmyrank is very easy to use. It is not complicated but it is not your typical link submission service. Here are a few things you need to expect while using it.

• Add your domains. Set posting frequency or schedule it. Remember to choose the correct category as well.
• BuildMyRank is pretty stringent on the quality of your content and it does not accept spun content except if it is very very well spunned(according to some users). To date, I have never used spunned content on any of my articles.
• If you have grammatical or spelling errors, your articles will also not be accepted.
• Every article is reviewed and to date, 5 of my articles have been rejected for various reasons as mentioned above. So, yes you need to be cautious about quality but of course you don’t need well researched / thesis standard articles!
• Buildmyrank requires articles of at least 150 words. You are only allowed to have 1 link for every 150 words which means 2 links for 300 words and so forth.
• Buildmyrank is labour intensive and unless you hire a writer from Fiverr or any other freelancing sites, you are going to be typing every single article.
• You can also opt to use Buildmyrank’s own writing service at about $2.50 per 150 words if you are too darn lazy to write or too rich.

Basically, if you sign up for the Buildmyrank trial, you will see your dashboard that allows you to add content immediately for submission. If you signed up for the trial, you can only submit content that will link back to a max of 5 domains. The trial also allows only up to 10 free links.

Should I Sign Up For Buildmyrank?

I put in a lot of thought before choosing Buildmyrank mainly because there are plenty of article submission sites and link building services that don’t work too well. I have used a few before and it has not given me good results. So naturally, the skepticism that I had in my head was not something unexpected but the results surpassed my expectations and changed my views on Buildmyrank completely.

Sure it is a labour intensive process of writing articles and you can only submit to only 1 site but it produced far better results that other article submission sites that submit to many more article directories.

Here are the results of my various keywords, sites and submission results I got from Buildmyrank.

Submission Stats

• I have submitted approximately 158 articles over a course of 1.5 months. Each article is about 150 words in length.
• There is however a ratio of 2/3^rd 150 words and 1/3^rd 300 words or more.
• I have links published on various PR sites – 1 PR6,13 PR4, 30 PR3, 66 PR2, 42 PR1 6 PR 0 in TOTAL.

I have done 2 case studies on two of my Amazon niche sites.

CASE STUDY #1

Site 1 – Competitive Niche, failed miserably trying to rank with UAW.

My monetization method for this site is through Google Adsense, Affiliate marketing and List Building

Keyword 1 – Google placed me on Page 5, which isn’t great!

>>> Started Using BuildMyRank from here onwards…

After 2 weeks of use – BuildMyRank boosted my Page 5 rankings to Page 3 rankings which isn’t bad considering that I am ONLY using BuildMyRank to test its effectiveness at ranking my sites.

After 4 weeks of use – BuildMyRank boosted it to Page 2 rankings on Google. It sits somewhere in between the top and the last on that page. (#15)

After 5 weeks of use – Page 1 Rankings, decent position at about #10.

Currently, this keyword puts my site on #5 on Page 1 for this ranking which is pretty impressive considering that I don’t even use any other backlink methods apart from scattered social bookmarking for this period of time.

I even managed to push one eHow, one Squidoo and a few high authority sites to the bottom of page 1 and the beginning of Page 2 which is no mean feat considering that this site is just about 3 months old.

>>>This is after writing about 40 articles with Keyword 1

Keyword 2 – Google placed me on Page 2 at #17

After 4 weeks of use – Placed on position #7 on Google from #17

>>>This is after just 12 articles with Keyword 2

Keyword 3 – Google placed me on Page 4 at #36 (highly competitive keyword with 8 million competing sites)

After 2 weeks of use – Placed on position #18

After 5 weeks of use – Placed on position #10

>>>This is after about 26 articles with Keyword 3

CASE STUDY #2

Site 2 – Not very competitive niche initially. But has got even more competitive recently and has failed miserably trying to rank in the past. For this site some of my link building efforts include guest posting and BuildMyRank

Monetizing though Amazon Affiliate Marketing ONLY

Keyword 1 – Placed on Page 5 on Google #46

After 2 weeks of use – Placed on position #31

After 3 weeks of use – Placed on Position #18

End of 3 weeks – BuildMyRank boosted my rankings to #13

After 6 weeks of use – Page 1 rankings at #5

This second case study has helped reassured a fact that if your site does not appear on the first page, you will not earn anything at all!

This keyword that I was trying to rank for is a very competitive term when I tried to rank for but once ranked well, it is certainly one of those “MONEY KEYWORDS”.

>>>This is after writing 48 articles with Keyword 1

Keyword 2 – Placed on Page 6 at #53 (another “money keyword”)

After 4 weeks of use – Page 1 rankings at #4

>>>This is after writing 24 articles with Keyword 2

So far, I have got really good results from BuildMyRank and the fact that it boosted my rankings in such a short time makes me want to continue using it. It is certainly the best link building service I have used.

One thing to note is that you must always continue to build links otherwise, your rankings will drop. I have conducted an experiment on this as well by not building links and even within 2 weeks, I see one of my sites drop from Page 1 to Page 2 rankings.

Before you go ahead and choose BuildMyRank as a link building service, I would suggest that you follow these tips that I will share with you based on my personal experience using it.

Tips on Maximizing Results When Using BuildMyRank

1. Don’t write posts that sound so much like a review. Write reviews from a personal viewpoint especially from a first person perspective to get better results i.e published on higher PR sites.
2. Longer posts i.e 300 words will get you better results. But this does not happen all the time. Publish a mixture of 150 word and 300 word articles.
3. Be consistent with your posting. You can either schedule your posting or publish max 10 articles a day. Whatever method you choose be it one article per day or ten be consistent with it.

FINALLY

I hope this Case Study + Review helps you get a better idea about using BuildMyRank. I highly recommend using this service as it really works or has so far worked BEST for me!

Try this service FREE and get 10 permanent backlinks to your sites.

Scott our guest poster today will tell you more about how to use Google Plus for your online business.

If you have been using Facebook as one of the ways you promote your online business and grow your customer base, Google has made the process much easier with the introduction of its Google + or Google Plus. Experts who have reviewed this new social networking site report that they found it to be more compelling and engaging than Facebook and of course, it is easy to use.

How to access Google +

After some testing by a select few, who received special invitations, Google+ is now available for everyone to sign up for.  You need to have a Google account and a gmail address. Both of these are free. If you have an online business, chances are you have been using Google Adsense, so you already have an account in place.

When you have a Google account, every time you search any topic on the Internet, you will see its symbol (the plus sign) next to the results. You can make sure that this symbol is also next to your website. This will also place the button on your web pages so that anyone who reads and likes your content will give it a Thumbs Up.

It is called getting a pulse. Like other sites where you have to enter a word or phrase to prove that you are a real person, this click on the symbol tells Google that a person has actually visited the site and considers it worthy. You only need to have a few pulses in order for others to see that you have a site that they should check out.

Set up Circles of Friends or Associates

Google + makes it easy for you to grow your business online because you can create circles of friends. If there are only certain friends with whom you share any details of your business, you can set up a special circle containing only these people. All you have to do is drag the icon of each person into the circle and give the circle a name.

Have a face to face chat

You can chat with friends face to face on Google +. In this way it is very similar to Skype, but you can talk to more than one friend at the same time. This allows you to get the word out to all your connections at the same time because you don’t have to email each one individually. You can set up demonstrations of your product if you wish so that they can all see it at the same time.

This feature of Google + is called the Hangout. You simply let others know that you are available at the Hangout and they will log in. At the same time, when you see one or more of your friends at the Hangout, you can join them.

Instantly upload your photos

Share any photos that you wish with specific friends on Google +. The photos are instantly downloaded to a private Google album.

Google + is not quite ready for everyone to use just yet. But when it is there is no doubt that it will very quickly become one of the most important ways to make money online because of all the benefits that it has for businesses – both large and small.

Today let me introduce to you Nick Stamoulis, writer of SEO Journal and a Boston SEO Consultant on his guest post on this blog on a very popular topic. Nick shares with us his views on turning that old boring blog post into some more refreshing.

Check it out…

Blogs are great.  They allow blog writers to share their knowledge and expertise and be viewed as a thought leader in a given niche.  However, for many bloggers one of the most difficult aspects of blogging is to come up with quality content on a consistent basis.  It’s important to blog regularly, but sometimes topic ideas are hard to come by.  When you’re stuck and experiencing writers block it’s a good idea to revisit your previous work and turn what’s old into something new.

Here are 4 ways to update old blog posts:

Add value

Old blog posts may be dated, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be valuable.  Use an old blog post as a guide and add new information to make it more relevant.  As time goes on your knowledge has grown (hopefully) and maybe there is something that you once wrote about that you can now expand upon.  Discuss the details that are missing from the old post.  Turn a post that was once very high-level into something much more specific that provides new insights and value to the readers.

Optimize

Hopefully all bloggers understand SEO and its importance now, but maybe you didn’t a few years ago when you first started your blog, or maybe you just didn’t understand it as well as you do now.  Old blog posts can still rank in the search engines.  In fact, age is a big search engine trust factor and web pages that have aged tend to rank better on a search engine results page.  So, why not go back and see if you can better optimize your old blog posts for the keywords that you are targeting?  Incorporate keywords into the title and content naturally.  Also, be sure to include an image tag using keywords if you’ve used an image in the blog post.  Many people skip this step and just added a photo because it looked pretty, but it can also serve an SEO related purpose.

Follow Up

Sometimes you might not even understand why, but it’s likely that some posts just got a lot more attention and comments than others.  Take a look back at those posts.  Was it a hot topic at the time?  What has changed since then?  Discuss the old post, link to it, and include follow up information in a new post.

Promote

A great way to promote blog posts is through an opt-in email newsletter or via social media.  Hopefully, if you are using social media correctly, you have increased the number of connections, fans, and followers that you have.  Maybe you’ve even joined a few new networking sites in the time since you started writing your blog.  It’s likely that your blog readers never scroll back to see what’s been written in the past- so show them! Promote old blog posts just as you would promote the new ones.  It’s just important to make sure that the content is still relevant before using this strategy.

About the Author:

Nick Stamoulis is a Boston SEO consultant and the President and Founder of Brick Marketing.  He writes SEO articles daily on his blog, Search Engine Optimization Journal.  For more information please call 781-999-1222.

This is probably the most common question any webmaster will ask. This is also probably the greatest source of frustration especially when it comes to your money sites. Most people who ask this falls into the category of those who have worked hard and spend hours building content and backlinks all over the internet trying to rank well on the search engines (like me..)

The truth is trying to rank on the first page is HARDDD work.

UNLESS, very few people compete with you to rank.

Managing my niche sites have been a very educational experience even if I didn’t see it getting the success I wanted. I’ve talked about my methods here.

Niche Site Experiment – Keyword Research

Niche Site Experiment – Finding A Niche

How I do it now has changed slightly but the fundamentals behind it remain the same.

So why the heck are some of my sites not ranking well? This is what I’ve found out so far…

It Takes TIME

This is so true. When all the internet marketers talk about “pushing the button” , you should really run as far away as possible from them because there is no such thing as immediate results. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is using SEO, building backlinks and doing the same thing as you, so unless you don’t wanna work hard to get your site rank over the long haul, you won’t see results.

Expect up to 6 months or more in some cases to see you getting some decent traffic and page 1 rankings even with all your efforts put into creating backlinks and content. Some might say 3 months but I don’t see that happening with mine so far.

Even if it takes time, learn how to work smart. Check out this post on using the 80/20 method.

You should also learn how to outsource here. Follow my Tips on Outsourcing.

Ranking Criteria

The rules of the game have changed. If you wanna play the Google game, you have to live by their rules. The change in algorithms recently have led me to believe in a few things with some research done to back its findings.

Domain Age – I’ve discovered that domain age is an important part of rankings. For example when this blog started it did not rank well for quite a number of keyphrases but right now, it didn’t take much effort to find its way into the page 1 rankings for quite a number of posts. A lot of other SEO pros agree that Domain age is a factor in rankings so even if your site is in the top 500 rankings, wait a while and see if it changes, (although I wouldn’t recommend just waiting and hoping for it to happen.)

Backlink Building Consistency– Backlinks are an important part of any search engine ranking process. There are plenty of folks around who agree that your link building efforts have to be continuous and there is no way you can stop building links in the earlier stage of your website and hope for it to rank unless you don’t even want it to rank.  It has to be a continuous process especially for your money / niche sites. Consistency is the key if you expect good rankings. Diversity, relevance and authority should be part of your link building process.

Number don’t really matter although you need to continue building it. Instead of focusing on numbers you should focus on quality. Take a look at your own backlinks, are they primarily from article submission sites? (like most people do).

Backlink Diversity – What is Your Backlink Strategy? Is it fully concentrated on article marketing? Bear in mind that article marketing must not be your sole focus as it is generally recognized as LOW QUALITY in the eyes of search engines. If your backlinks are skewed towards article marketing you should start building links somewhere else too.  Blog commenting, social sharing sites, feed bookmarking, guest posting articles are some examples. Consider those even from .edu and .gov websites.

Another question to ask is are all your links build on roughly the same sort of domains? Links build on different domains and different countries can affect your rankings too. So don’t just focus on sites from US.

Spread your links to the entire world!

Is Your Site Loaded with Thin Content or Repeated Content?

This part is probably the most important thing you want to focus on. It is obvious that poorly written content, duplicated content or sites with little content will have trouble ranking.  If your site falls into this category, go and fix it right now. Don’t expect all the thousands of backlinks to help your site rank well.

>>>Take a look at this article on thin or no original content on Google Webmaster

It is much better to write content so good that people would want to link to you. My suggestion for every new site you create is to preload it with a number of good content for Google to crawl.  You should also take a look at this article on Google’s guidance on building high quality sites. It is a MUST read.

>>> Google’s Guidance on building high quality sites

You should also read some guidelines about building affiliate sites. With thousands of webpages showing the same thing, what can make your site better than the rest?

>>> Guidance On Affiliate Programs

Anyway, creating good content is hard but if this is your aim on every single article you write, you are sure to be linked by other sites. Strive to make all your content link worthy. Remember, Google ABSOLUTELY loves quality content so give it to Google! Even if no site links back to you, Google will want others to look at YOURS FIRST!

HTML/ Code Errors On Your Page?

Good clean code is another important ranking factor. That is why I chose to use THESIS. Even Matt Cutts use Thesis!

Point is, you should strive to keep your website as error free as possible. It is quite impossible to keep any site error free. Even mine here has quite a number of errors that I’m working on. The trouble with coding errors is that it can confuse or make life difficult for spider bots. You want them to find all your content easily. You also don’t want the spider bots to get lost crawling.

Want to find out if your site has clean code? Use this tool.

>>>W3C Markup Validation Service

I hope this has answered most of your ranking problems. Good Luck!

Did you know that content is one of the primary driving forces on the internet. This applies to niche sites and all other online business models you can ever imagine. Leveraging content is nothing new but a lot of people are still scratching their heads on how to generate traffic. Well in this post Mitch O’Connor our guest poster will tell you how…

You can’t sell anything if no one is checking out the items you offer. That’s why traffic generation is among the most important aspects of building niche sites. And while generating traffic can seem like a daunting task, there’s no reason to make it harder than it needs to be. It’s possible to generate traffic with minimal work by leveraging what you’ve already done. In other words, take something that is already created and use the content to make a video, slide show, email, or report.

Emails

It is smart to use content you’ve already created in your customer emails, as it can remind them about something they’ve seen on your site or get them interested in learning more about the products your niche site is offering. Most people who signed up to receive email from your site probably haven’t seen every video you’ve created or post you’ve written. For example, if your niche site sells Halloween costumes, you may want to use pictures and descriptions of current, popular items such as Toy Story costumes, Disney princess costumes, or Batman costumes in your emails to customers. This information is already listed on your site, but the customer may not have seen it or may only have seen it when they were not looking for a Halloween costume. Also, you can easily use information that is already on your site in your email auto responder.

YouTube

According to statistics released by YouTube, at least three billion video clips are viewed by users each day. Making a slide show of pictures from your website and putting in relevant background music is one way to use your existing content to tap into this huge market. Another easy way to take advantage of YouTube is to use content from a post or article already on your site to create a power point presentation. The content shouldn’t be copied word for word, but you could make bullet points for the most important ideas and explain them on camera in person. This allows you to connect with your audience on another level without putting in a large amount of effort. Don’t forget to include a link to your site in the video description and to keep your YouTube business profile updated.

Reports/PDFs

Many people who run websites don’t think of it, but you can easily use several posts or articles that are already posted on your site to create reports or pdfs to sell or give to potential customers. It’s natural to think that nobody would want to buy this info when it can be found for free on your site, but the truth is that people like organized information. They’ll be happy to buy something that’s well-organized and all in one place. One idea is to create a small report and post it on Fiverr for $5 – this will make a great lead generator. Using affiliates to help sell your report (affiliate program) is another great way to get traffic.

Another option involves taking a PDF or flyer you have created and printing copies to give out at trade shows or other events in your industry. You can list your website along with an example of the information that can be found on your site. This is a great way to meet people for networking purposes as well as to connect with potential customers, and it can also be fun. Sticking with our Halloween costume example, it would be great for business to dress up when you hand out the information. Setting up a booth and handing out a flyer to the public takes time and effort, but attracting customers to your niche site is definitely beneficial to your bottom line. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about $222,464,000,000 was spent by Americans in 2007 on items that were sold by telephone, Internet, and catalogs. It’s likely that even more money is being spent on the Internet today. Generating traffic to your site is the best way to ensure that some of these dollars go to your company – by using what you already have to get it.

Whether or not you are running an online eBay store, selling affiliate products, selling your own informational products or managing Amazon niche sites, without good time management you are most likely going to end up piling yourself with tons of work that will never seem to end. That is where the Pareto principle or commonly known as the 80/20 rule comes in very helpful for your business.

Remember we only have 24 hours a day and all of that can quickly run out without achieving anything. I remember countless times when I’ve watched the hours pass without doing much for the day. You can’t expect that “lost” time to come back but you can manage it more effectively and avoid making the same mistake again.

First off, before we begin, regardless of your methods of making money online, there are several aspects to an online business you must have. Take a look at this below:

• Niche Research
• Keyword Research
• SEO
• Traffic Generation
• Website Creation / Editing
• Content Creation
• Email Newsletter
• Social Media Marketing
• Graphics Editing
• Analytics

Optional: PPC (for advanced users), Offline promotional strategies.

As you can see here, there is a whole lot of things you need to do whether you choose to blog to make money online, setup a forum or setup your own SEO company. You cannot say one is less important than the other in the list BUT YOU ALSO CANNOT DO EVERYTHING THERE. Those who have been successful online hire freelancers, virtual assistants or have a mini crew of people working for them to be successful. No one works alone and expect to be successful in a short time.

Now that you’ve already had a reality check on what you need to do, it is time to give you an outline of principles so that you can make full use of your time and increase work productivity.

80/20 Rule Tip #1: Do a Reality Check and Cross Things Out (From That List)

This is probably one of the most important step but sometimes it only comes with experience. Personally, I like creating content but I just suck so bad at social media promotion. I have improved but not that much still. So I’ve crossed that out of my list (among a few..) I can do a little bit of graphics editing but it is just too time consuming. The time I spent fixing up my ebook or my website is the same amount of time I take to write 1 or 2 pieces of article for my projects.

So isn’t it a waste of time?

If you encounter this problem, make a note of it and consider removing it from your to do list!

How to tackle this problem?

Outsource it! There are tons and tons of people all over the world who are willing to work for cheap money just to do banner graphics, ebook cover. Trust me, places like Elance, Odesk and Fiverr are filled with workers hungry for work like this.

You could suck so bad at link building or SEO but whatever you are not good at, find someone else to do it.

Don’t complain of the money you spend on this people because you will know how much “extra” time you have after doing this. Remember time is MONEY and this is so true even in the online business world.

80/20 Rule Tip #2: Go Through That List and Find the Most Effective Way of Achieving Them

There is a whole bunch of things you need to do on that list but have you found one what works effectively for each of them? This is another thing that comes with experience and it varies between marketers. What works for me does not necessarily work for you. Before you begin, you need to brainstorm and ask a couple of questions in your mind. Write them down and examine each one carefully.

Let’s take social media as an example..

Do you know what are the best social media marketing methods for your business?

• Is it Twitter
• Is it Linkedin?
• Is it Facebook?
• Is it worth it to pay $5 to someone on Fiverr to blast your tweets to 50k followers?
• Is it worth to hire a social media manager?
• Is it worth to learn that new course on creating Facebook Pages
• What is the most effective means of getting more fans?

As you can expect, there is a certain degree of trial and error that goes along the way. There will be some time wasted in the initial phase but I can assure you that low yield things like “blasts to 50k followers” are worthless. They are non targeted traffic and the most you’ll get out of that is 50k visitors with no opt-ins or conversions.

I don’t have the answer for you in this area but sometimes you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Find out what works for others and give it a go. If it works great for you, do it and make it work 110%!!!

80/20 Rule Tip #3: Examine Your Link Building Efforts

This is an example of the previous point actually. I’m showing you how to do it.

Link building is a really tricky thing. The reason why I put this in the list is because it is one of the biggest pains about getting your site ranked and getting organic traffic. Link building might sound easy on the surface. You might have come across things like link building packets, link blasts, submissions to 10,000 article directories, article marketing etc but after being online for a while and post Panda, there are a lot of spammy submissions that won’t even be considered as good quality links by the search engines anymore. Sure you could spend $100 for 10000 submissions but is it worth it? Is this effort going to result in an increase in search engine rankings/ traffic etc.

The question you have to ask is:

Is it really worth your time doing?

Is it high yield?

My personal experience with link building is that article submissions to so-called directories or sites hardly works now. I have tried doing this and it has not actually given me good results. It probably works for a short while and then it just doesn’t. I know there are some who will disagree with me but what works much better for me are things like commenting, getting your post mentioned on other posts and guest posting. Even so, it takes time. Obviously this is better quality link building but it is going to be time consuming. Obviously, article marketing post Panda is different. And manual hard labour will yield results. If you’ve understood what you must do here, you could probably get someone else to do this for you just like how I mentioned in the previous point.

N.B Don’t get me wrong here. I am not saying don’t use Squidoo or Hubpages or any Web 2.0 sites to promote your material. Just make sure its quality.

80/20 Rule Tip #4: Find a Buddy / Partner To Help With Your Business

Even with all that outsourcing etc, you probably can’t succeed alone. Well you are not working alone but you need a buddy. You need someone who has the same vision as you, the same goals as you, the same objectives as you and probably someone with more experience. Think of it as someone who can sort of complement you and “amplify” your business to greater heights.

It isn’t easy to find someone but it pays to network with people who are doing almost the same thing as you. I don’t have much experience in this area yet but this is one aspect of your business that you should consider because the rewards can be plentiful through a partnership.

Great places to look for business buddies are through blogs, social media and in real life. If a family member of yours also has the same interests and vision as you why not partner and make your business better?

80/20 Rule Tip #5: Don’t Waste Your Time on Unnecessary Activities

Do you know what my greatest time wasting activity is online?

Analytics…

Yes. That’s right. I can stare at stats and check ranking changes for a few hours if I don’t tell myself to stop looking. Analytics is important especially finding out which page converts well for you or which page has the greatest visits etc. But spending too much time looking at analytics won’t help your business either. The key is to focus on stats that are helping you a lot.

I’m just giving you an example here but you get the idea. What is your worst time wasting activity? Is it surfing for videos? Surfing blogs? Chatting?

Your time wasting activity could be anything online. If you have already identified it, do less of it. Alternatively, make time blocks for any activity that you do. That way you know what to focus on and how long you need to focus on it.

Finally….

Feeling exhausted already or have I completely lost you??? Either way, I hope you get the idea that you need to focus on high yield activity to drive your business. Do you have anything to add? If so let me know in your comments below.

SEO Tips here we go again…

How many articles about SEO should we read about before we can actually master it?

1? 2? 501?

Sometimes it is just good to stick with ONE article that explains everything from A to Z. But it is hard to find such an article. Of course the world of SEO changes a lot but what if I decide to break it down to things like “building backlinks…” for example which is essentially a part of SEO.

What if there is one article that gives you a good general idea of it without going too much into the specifics?

The entire internet is already littered with articles about SEO tips and a whole lot are just repeatedly written content. Do we really need another article about SEO tips? Here are some SEO topics that I’ve seen way waaaaayyyyy too often around….

X Link Building Tips / X Number of ways to Build Links

I can’t believe so many people have written about this over the years. Granted, probably before Google decides to change its own algorithm, you could probably use the same methods to build links. I’ve also written a few blog posts about link building right here.

Link Building Recipe: Picking the Quality Ingredients

Link Building Recipe: Bad Ingredients That Spoil The Pot

Link Building Strategies – 5 Tips You’ve Not Heard Often + More Resources

Suffice to say they are mostly things you’ve heard of before. But I think we REALLY need to hear more about link building in a new light post Panda. Enough of the typical posts on link building.

Keyword Research blah blah…

“How to do Keyword Research” is probably the most common title I’ve come across. And no offence there are some great posts out there but sometimes enough is enough. I can almost predict with 95% certainty what they are going to say i.e tools they use, their methods, etc.

I’m pretty sure every post will talk about using Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, Market Samurai, Google Trends which are all great tools (mind you..), but I think we all know that already. Or are we just trying to search for one article that answers it all?

If anyone wants to have a great grasp of keyword research, this is the article to read.

Keyword Research: The Ultimate Guide

Otherwise, it will be worthwhile looking at some case studies… There’s a sheer lack of keyword research based case studies.

Google Panda Update

This is another article that has also been talked way… waaaay too much. Oh we all know that already, don’t we? Focusing on quality content? Banishing article directories? Banishing content farms? Deranking sites with poor or thin content?

Let us just forget about other posts we’ve read and check out this blog post. Great for those with attention span problems reading insanely long posts.

Google Panda Update and SEO Practices

Content is King / Content is NOT King / Content is Queen Debate

Here comes the debate that is as old as the topic itself. It seems that there is a never-ending slew of blog posts related to it. Is content really king? Not any longer. You probably know that content alone will not sustain your blog. If no one reads it or finds it then it is pointless. There are millions of blogs on the internet these days, and are we listening to every single one of them? An expert doesn’t even stand a chance these days. If every blog has great quality content, what draws the line between those that I choose to read and those that I don’t?

Read this post:

Is Content King?

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is bad! Duplicate content is ok… Or so they say. With so much confusion and so many opinions, can we trust anyone? It amazes me sometimes why people are so worked up on this when all they need to do is read the guidelines on Google Webmaster. The bottom line is that if your intentions are to manipulate the search engine rankings through duplicated content, then your site will be in trouble. There are however exceptions.  The issue about duplicate content and how Google view it can be seen in this link below.

Dealing with Duplicate Content

So please read it! There are heaps more you can learn from their guide and don’t forget to check out the forums!

Finally…

SEO is never finished. But it is not the only ingredient for success. Let us also stop writing posts on stale SEO topics that have been talked thousands of times already.

Let me ask you a question… How long have you been doing business online? And how much time do you spend in a day, trying to do ALL THE TASKS that you want to achieve and SUCCESSFULLY complete ALL of them?

Noticed that I have ALL THE TASKS, SUCCESSFULLY and ALL in uppercase???

It took me a really long time to realize how beneficial outsourcing is, even though every single successful internet marketer talks about doing it, well at least for the one who are honest enough to say so!

Well the mental block that I had was the money I had to spend to outsource my business. Again it took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t the MONEY I HAD TO SPEND but rather THE INVESTMENT I HAD TO MAKE…

So did you notice the difference again?

While managing my niche sites, it has come to a point when adding content, SEO, promoting the site, backlinking with some minor social marketing was starting to drive me nuts! How could anyone do this for 5 sites let alone some who boast about 20 or even 100 sites! And try doing this for the next 6 months before seeing any benefit from all your hard work.

I bet anyone would give up… Cos I WOULD.

But I’ve never thought of throwing in the towel. I just needed to change the way I think to see the real benefits of outsourcing and it was when I started outsourcing that I really see how much time I had on my hands to do more important things or things that I was better at doing.

Enough of the long intro but what about the real advantages of outsourcing?

1. How Much Is Your Time Worth?

This is one of the most important areas to look at. Even if you don’t remember what I said after this, think about this carefully.

I can’t brag like some of the other internet marketers around but I do know that my time is worth more than I pay freelance writers on oDesk (not the premium writers of course ). You have got to factor in your overall income and divide it by the number of hours worked to calculate how much your time is worth. For most of us, our time is worth much more than the how much you need to pay a freelance writer which can be as low as $3 an hour.

2. Admit It! You’re Not Good at Everything

This might be hard to swallow but you have to know your strengths and your weaknesses. You can’t learn everything and expect to be good at everything. Sure you might know something about content creation, website design, SEO, traffic generation etc. At the end of the day, you will soon realize that you are not so good at certain things. Worse, you might just mess things up and you won’t even know until it is too late!

There are lots of people who are good at backlinking, SEO and all the technical mumbo jumbo than you. If you suck at creating website banners, then why waste your time mucking around with Photoshop only to find that 3 hours have passed and you’ve not accomplished one task yet? This is just one example but there are great freelance workers you can find on oDesk and Fiverr. There are also other sites like Elance and other freelancing sites you can check out for yourself.

At the end of the day, you have to delegate tasks especially those you are not good at and you will appreciate the long term benefits of doing so over time.

3. Focus On Your Strengths

This is like a continuation from the previous point. When you delegate tasks to those who can do it better, you can now focus on what you are good at. Sometimes your strengths are vital to generating sales for your business. You might write good email newsletters which are essential in building trust with your customers. You are probably good at creating thank you pages and split testing stuff which can have a great impact on conversion rates and sales.

Even if you are not good at doing those things, you are probably good at generating content for your niche sites. Since “Panda bear unleashed its full force”, quality content has become even more important so if this is your strength outsource the other technical and sales side of things to someone who could do it better.

By eliminating the distractions you have previously, you are now focusing your efforts on getting more returns for your business. In a way you can sum this up as the Pareto Principle whereby 20% of your efforts account for 80% returns/outcomes

4. Expand Your Business

More time on your hands gives you the opportunity to try new things. To give you an example, without outsourcing certain things like content creation for some of my sites, I would have had problems experimenting new stuff or setting up another site because as you know content creation consumes a lot of time. Even if you are managing a blog, it gives you opportunities to work on a membership site, start podcasts, start video casts or even create an informational product. All these plans can have good income potential.

Outsourcing the old stuff allows you to find new possibilities of income for your business. It’s virtually impossible to do that if you try to juggle every single aspect of your business by yourself

5. You Need A Life

Don’t tell me you want to spend 16 hour days (assuming you don’t do anything but sit in front of the computer and the rest to sleep) for 7 days just to make everything work? Everyone needs a break and everyone needs some time off to do other things. More time on your hands means more time with your friends, social activities, loved ones, hobbies and holidays.

More time away from your work gives you time to think through things, get inspiration and the boost to work on your online business again!

I can assure you that no one can grow their business more than someone who outsources their work. E There is so much more you can do when you lighten the burden by offloading mundane tasks or tasks that you are not good at to those who can do it better than you. If there is one thing I should have done earlier if only I’ve realized the benefits and had a mental shift in thinking, I would have outsourced my work much earlier.

Now that you know the benefits of outsourcing, do you know how to go about with it?

Not sure?

For Odesk

Well then, here is a fantastic guide on how to hire workers from oDesk. I’ve been using this guide here to hire workers for my business.

For Fiverr

This my friends is a very complete post for poor people who are thinking of outsourcing their online business. Even if you are NOT poor, check it out!

I hope you enjoy this post and have learned something from it. Please share your thoughts and comments about outsourcing. Even if you disagree with me, I like to hear it!