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Website Business 101
The Timeless Secrets of Successful Internet Business
By Falko Luedtke
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Contents
Website Business 101 .................................................................................................. 1
COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER ............................4
Disclaimer......................................................4
FALKO, WHO ARE YOU? .................................................................................................... 5
WHY DID YOU WRITE THIS EBOOK AND GIVE IT AWAY FREE?................................................. 6
RESOURCES USED IN THIS EBOOK ...................................................................................... 7
WEBSITE BUSINESS VS “BRICK AND MORTAR” BUSINESS ..................................................... 8
WHY MOST WEBSITE BUSINESSES FAIL TO MAKE MONEY .................................................... 10
SELECTING YOUR WEBSITE BUSINESS MODEL .................................................................... 11
Content Publishing:.....................................11
Professional services website:.....................11
eCommerce Store:.......................................12
Education Services: .....................................12
Software Development: ..............................13
FINDING THE RIGHT BUSINESS IDEA FOR YOURSELF............................................................ 14
RESEARCHING YOUR BUSINESS IDEA................................................................................. 15
PLAN YOUR STRATEGIES FROM THE START..........17
HAVE GOALS & BUDGET FOR EACH WEBSITE BUSINESS YOU START ...................................... 18
OUTSOURCE SO YOU DON’T NEED TO CLONE YOURSELF...................................................... 19
INTERNET MARKETING ESSENTIALS.................................................................................. 20
E-MAIL LIST – CAPTURE THESE LEADS & CONVERT THEM................................................... 21
SEO – GET TRAFFIC ORGANICALLY.................................................................................. 23
Localization:.................................................23
Site structure & duplicate content:.............24
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Link Building:...............................................24
SALES FUNNEL – CONTENT IS PRIZED AND CONVERSION IS KING........................................ 25
PPC – PAY FOR TRAFFIC THAT CONVERTS.......................................................................... 27
Geotargeted Ads:.........................................27
Quality Score:..............................................27
PPC in Video Marketing: .............................27
SOCIAL MARKETING – CONNECT AND BE SOCIAL ............................................................... 29
Being social on the Internet:.......................29
PUBLIC RELATIONS – HELP OTHERS GET BIG BY HELPING BACK ........................................... 30
SETUP ALL ESSENTIALS AND START YOUR WEBSITE BUSINESS............................................... 31
Research:.....................................................31
Design:.........................................................31
Domain & Hosting:......................................31
Web platform: .............................................31
Email accounts and newsletter: ..................32
Accounts and money:..................................32
Directory Submission: .................................32
GET READY TO LAUNCH IN 10, 9, 8 … ............................................................................. 34
NOW THE REAL WORK STARTS......................................................................................... 36
The 80 – 20 Rule:.........................................36
BECOME A MASTER, MY YOUNG PADAWAN...................................................................... 38
Take on your own apprentices: ...................38
SUMMING THIS UP ........................................................................................................ 39
THANK YOU .................................................................................................................. 40
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COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER
Copyright 2010 by Falko Luedtke. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any
Information storage and retrieval system, without permission in written from the
Author, Falko Luedtke (except for the reviewer, who may quote brief passages and/
or short brief video clips in a review.)
Disclaimer
The Author, Falko Luedtke, makes no representations or warranties with respect to
the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaims
all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular
purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional
materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every
situation. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent
professional should be sought. The Author shall not be liable for damages arising
here from. The fact that an organization or website is referred to in this work as a
citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the
Author endorses the information the organization or website may provide or
recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet
websites listed in the work might have changed.
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FALKO, WHO ARE YOU?
Thank you for downloading my first eBook. My name is Falko
Luedtke. I was born and raised in Berlin, Germany. I moved 4
years ago, around the time of my writing this book, from
Berlin to Vancouver, B.C., Canada on my own. I arrived here
without being able to speak much English. I had decided to immigrate to learn
English and explore my possibilities halfway around the globe. Now I’m a permanent
resident of Canada and I hope to be a Citizen within a few years. I work as a Strategic
Internet Marketer and have just finished writing my first eBook that you are now
reading.
My Career in IT started when I was 6 years old. My father purchased the first
commonly available 386 PC in Germany in early 1990. A few months later, when I
had learned the basics of how a computer works, I noticed my father tinkering, with
the hardware, unsuccessfully to install a sound card. I decided to take the computer
apart and fix the issue myself so I could play Industry Tycoon. You should have seen
my mother’s face checking on me when she came home! I was glad I figured this all
out before my Dad arrived. :o) Since then, you can not really tear me away from
computers. I found it often made much more sense than most people around me
did. Over a half year before graduation from school in 2001, I was selected out of
over 20,000 candidates for one of the 20 spots as an IBM apprentice. In recent years,
I have helped companies around the world to achieve higher traffic and profits from
their website business. I am writing a blog at http://falkoinc.com as well as
developing some of my own projects and working with a few selected clients on
projects.
This eBook is meant to help people get an overview of how to start a website
business, what is involved in making your presence known on the Internet and
monetizing your opportunity. Since the eBook is meant to be rather helpful and
short versus long and boring, I will recommend more reading material whenever
possible. I will also publish more advanced and detailed articles on my blog, at
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If you have any questions about this book and content in it or face an issue that I
could help you with, please feel free to contact me on my site, Twitter or Facebook.
I’m looking forward to getting to know you.
Thank you again for downloading this eBook, website business 101, the Timeless
Secrets of successful Internet business. I hope it will help you to succeed in your
website business.
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WHY DID YOU WRITE THIS EBOOK AND GIVE IT AWAY FREE?
I believe sharing is caring, so the main reason I wrote this book is to share my
knowledge with the world and hope that my readers can use the new skills they
learned to improve their life. I also hope to meet people who I can exchange
knowledge with and may be able to call them friends one day.
I guess the ultimate goal of this eBook is that one person who reads it improves their
life dramatically. Sure, everybody wants to be rich but this is not a get rich scheme or
a guide to making millions of dollars a day without doing anything. If you are
expecting this out of the book, don’t bother to read any further, this book is not for
you.
Do know that it will take much of your personal time, a lot of dedication and passion
for what you do to start your own business. I wish you the best of luck and hope that
this eBook helps you in your life’s adventures.
This eBook is simply the knowledge I have gathered over the past 20 years about IT.
The content in this eBook has been proven to work since I first used them at the
dawn of dynamic web development and search engines over 12 years ago.
Most of the book is technical, but I will try not to make it too boring. ;o) If you have
any recommendation on how I can improve it, I would love to hear from you.
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RESOURCES USED IN THIS EBOOK
Within this eBook, I will refer to different tools, services and people that I use and
follow. These are services I truly believe in and strongly recommend to my friends
and clients to use to improve their knowledge. You can never know enough, you can
only not share enough.
Aweber
Analytics
Adwords
Blog Profit Camp
Google Apps
SEO Book Training and Community
ShoeMoney.com
Winning the Web
Outsource Force
OM4 – Managed Wordpress hosting
Wordpress
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WEBSITE BUSINESS VS “BRICK AND MORTAR” BUSINESS
In the first decade of the 21st
Century, our society has innovated 100 times a month
more then in the 20th
Century. We went from riding horses to flying to the Moon and
we invented the Internet in the 20th
Century; think about what will be possible
within our lifetime. Some of our advancement in technology and medicine has also
created some of our biggest social and economic issues. 100 years ago the human
population was at 1.5 billion, a few weeks ago UNICEF released the latest population
estimates and it’s approaching 6.7 billion. This has created a huge economic impact,
seen with the Great Recession of 2008 and the still very unstable economy. With
respect to the baby boomer generation, being forced to hang on to their jobs a lot
longer than they expected before retirement, there is a difficult burden created for
young talents to learn the lessons they need to have for a long and successful career.
In addition, banks are rather difficult with lending money to young entrepreneurs
and the cost of leasing a space, filling it with furniture and stock is just too high for
most young talents to do their work, plus there can only be so many Starbucks on
the corners :).
For most, the solution is simple, start a website business, make money online.
Everybody is talking about it; everybody seems to make money with it, why
shouldn’t you? Truly, the Internet has given us a complete new marketplace where
we can show our products in completely new ways and sell them to almost 70% of
the human population.
Nevertheless, do not be fooled by people telling you that you can start a
moneymaking machine within hours and that you only need to pay $9 a month to
make it happen. They are lying to you as well as making money from you. To achieve
success in this competitive marketplace, you need to be willing to spend enormous
amounts of time learning and understanding, as well as socially interacting with your
industry online. It cost money but compared to the cost of traditional start up costs
for a local store, it is much lower and really depends on your expertise and capability
of learning new things. It could be as low as a few hundred dollars, it could be much
more than the cost of a traditional start-up. All depending on what your business
idea is.
The costs of starting a successful local store in a city like Vancouver for the first 2
years of business are around $300,000, which would include a lease on the location,
décor, inventory, employees, marketing and many other things as well as YOU
working 24/7 and not being able to stop which is why you call it self-employed.
If you would take the same amount of money and start a virtual company, you could
do the following things for the first two years. You could handle the legal work like
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incorporating yourself, hire a young talented development person out of University,
hire a graduate in the field of communication, as well as a young talented designer
and build 5 different website businesses with drop shippers so you don’t waste your
money on inventory. This should leave you at least $100k as marketing budget.
Building a virtual business is a lot more affordable than a traditional business with a
local storefront or manufacturing space. An online business promises much more
possibilities for growth.
Creating a website business you can easily reach 10 or 100 times the amount of
interested visitors in a month than you could have with a physical store. That also
means you could potentially sell 10 times the amount of products that you could
possibly do offline. That is where one of the larges issues in Website Business comes
in play, the Monetization of your website, current statistic suggest that less then 10%
of the website online are actually making income. The rest of the sites online never
make a dime.
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WHY MOST WEBSITE BUSINESSES FAIL TO MAKE MONEY
Many people run out of money and patience before they make enough money to
sustain themselves. They might get frustrated with what they are doing when they
don’t immediately achieve success with it. Alternatively, they hire people who are
unreliable, cheap and do not get the job done. There are many different reasons
why things do not work out as planned but often the main reason why this happens
is the “Owner”, if he even has a plan, has lost sight of it and isn’t following it. To
simplify it for a moment: failing to plan is planning to fail and not sticking to the plan
is even worse. Working from home, being alone most of the day, sitting in front of
your computer all day, not showered, in your pajamas and getting distracted by the
wasteful amount of information and pleasure at your fingertips. It is hard to follow
your plan, I know I have been there. For me, it seems that one thing that really helps
me is creating set routines so that I always have something to do next. It really helps
if you treat your website business as a traditional business from the very first day.
Separate your work from your private life, and have a private life. You can’t just work
all day, that is not healthy either. Finding balance in life and focusing on what is in
front of you will help you the most to succeed with your plans. Passion and an iron
will to succeed will help you find motivation even if you feel like there is nothing left;
if you say you CAN NOT you still have 70% left, so move it.
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SELECTING YOUR WEBSITE BUSINESS MODEL
One of the hardest challenges most of my clients encounter is knowing exactly what
it is their website should do. It seems like many people try to reinvent the wheel
rather than using existing tools and methods that have been proven to work.
Content Publishing:
Content publishing is the simplest form of a website business. By this I mean that
you are using your website to publish unique content and it either makes money
from ads on your site or from affiliate marketing. As an example, a Blog would be a
great starting point to build a content publishing business, it is easy to update and
low in cost. If you have built a website about your hobby, perhaps a Star Trek Fan
website, you can simply give this old site a new look by using WordPress. This will
help you build new content, setup your E-Mail list as well as help you find products
to sell. Now you have built yourself a content publishing business that has authority
and can start ranking organically quickly.
A few examples of successful content publishing businesses are Wikipedia, TMZ and
JohnChow.com. These are million dollar companies but a well run personal blog can
easily provide a comfortable income to a person if it is done right.
John Chow has created one of the best online education courses about how to
create profit with your blog. If you are interested in creating a content publishing
business you should check him out and download his free eBook after you are
finished reading here. ;o)
Professional Services Website:
The website business model for professional services is a broad range of things. For
example, a dentist, lawyer or Internet Marketing consultant would all setup a
professional website to show their services to their targeted customers. Nowadays,
most people would search on their phone or computer to find a service they would
need. If I’m looking for a plumber, I would first do a search for a plumber in
Vancouver, and then I see if they have a website or if they have been reviewed by
clients and I will try to find out as much as I can about them. You don’t want to do
business with people you can’t trust, right?
This trend is clearly emerging for all professional services you can think of and the
hunt for local search engine domination has just started. This business model is fairly
simple as well, you could use the WordPress platform for this model as well since it
would be useful to write a blog to keep in touch with your community and create
relationships with your readers.
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My friends at OM4 have created one of the best professional services I know. They
offer customized, managed professional websites on a special WordPress platform
for a low monthly fee. I actually use them myself for hosting my website, takes the
maintenance worries off my mind.
eCommerce Store:
The online store has been around for a long time but still is one of the biggest
money makers on the Internet. There are so many examples of successful
companies, but to name a few; Amazon, eBay and NexTag making billions and
mostly from other people doing the work.
Over the past few years, a trend has evolved where people build shopping cart sites
rather than an actual store to safely utilize the start up cost. However, since the
Internet is infinitive and with 7 billion people, there are a lot of needs to satisfy. This
means that there is a space for you to build the next mega online store.
Getting a successful online store running will take some time. One tip that you
should always remember when building a shopping cart site is “Be unique, stay in
touch and get reviews”.
The biggest issue you are facing when building a website business is that you need to
gain the trust of your customers and create awareness of your presence. If you are
starting from nothing, do not expect to be rich by tomorrow. Building your first
website business will be the hardest but stay with it and it will turn to gold.
Education Services:
In the coming years, this will be one of the biggest industries within the Internet.
Nowadays, it is so simple if you have the spare $, you can build a community website
and fill it with video and web content to start your own educational website. In a
few years, our children will not go to school anymore, they will sit in front of their
computers and learn from it. Think of it this way, with all the new possibilities of
communicating with each other, the Internet makes it simple for a Guru to share
their knowledge. For example, the University of Phoenix, does most of their courses
online, saving millions in space and employment costs. With one Guru creating the
material and being filmed when presenting the course, the same information is now
indefinitely available to everybody signed up to the course. The tests can be made
online and with the right programming, every test can be unique to the person being
tested. With low administration support costs, this approach makes it much more
affordable than having to pay teachers to stay around and answer questions. Also,
within a few years, Watson the IBM supercomputer, could even replace the need of
any human support people since it could answer questions like a human.
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Educational services are clearly on the rise judging from the sheer amount of such
services being offered by Gurus in almost every niche. The great thing about the
business model is there are an almost impossible to comprehend number of people
waiting for you to share your knowledge.
As an example, my friend Gyutae Park has created a really cool education
community called WinnersCircle where he provides the members of the community
with case studies to help them learn the best way on how to apply new marketing
strategies.
Software Development:
The software development business model is simple: you have an idea for a web
tool, you build it and then start selling access to it or make money from ads that are
displayed inside of your application. Some of the most famous companies doing this
kind of work would be Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
If you have a great idea for something, the first thing you should do is check if
somebody else already had this idea. In addition, outsourcing your development
needs for your new application can save you thousands of dollars but can also lead
you to frustration and a waste of your money. Developing a new system is nothing
you should take lightly. I personally rate this as the most difficult business model
where you would need the most start up capital, especially if you don’t know how to
program.
One of the biggest mistakes I see is when the owner changes his mind on something
small 120 times a day and the programming team is trying to play catch up. One of
the most important things is to create a plan, visualize your ideas and stick with the
plan.
In the next section, I will show you how to find the right business idea for yourself. I
hope you have found this information useful so far. If you have any suggestions on
this content please contact me so I can provide more information.
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FINDING THE RIGHT BUSINESS IDEA FOR YOURSELF
Finding the right business idea for yourself is likely the most difficult task you will
have. I think the best way to look at it is that the Internet is a near perfect image of
the world around you. If you are passionate about something and can talk about it
for hours at a time, there will be hundreds of other people who are also passionate
about the same thing and thousands who are interested in it.
So I guess what I’m saying is that you need to know yourself to know what the right
business idea is for you. What can you be passionate about? What topic could you
really devote and commit your time to?
For most people they find that their hobby is the perfect website business idea for
themselves.
In addition, most people fail with their business not for lack of passion and interest
but because they had a hard time committing to the difficult tasks involved.
Often I recommend to Internet entrepreneurs to keep the day job he/she is in and
start working in their free time on their own business. For example, starting a
content publishing business about your hobby can be done with a very small
investment of a few hundred dollars and a heavy commitment.
For most people, the first two years will require a commitment, almost every day, of
3-4 working to start up their website business. If you can sustain yourself for the two
years, more time commitment and hard work on your project will be the key.
The Goal, you ask? It’s simple: to establish yourself as a “Guru” in your niche. By
being passionate, knowledgeable and committed to your topic or niche you will have
an easier time to reach this goal for yourself.
I will explain more about the “Guru” status a little later in this eBook in the section
“Become a Master my young Padawan”. However, until then, keep on reading, in the
next section I will explain how you can research your business idea.
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RESEARCHING YOUR BUSINESS IDEA
One of the most important things when you are starting a website business is the
research into the market in order to clarify your idea. Reading industry publications,
following industry leader’s peer blogs and social media can give you an idea on what
is hot in the industry and what is not. It will also help you get a grasp of the language
used in your industry. It is always recommended to stay in sync with terms other
niche Gurus are using.
The next phase of the operation would be to find the right niche or starting point for
yourself. That sounds harder than it is; the great thing about us humans is that every
person has a different point of view and a different way to project our thoughts to
other people.
One of the best tools to use to find out more about your market is the Google
Adwords Keyword Research Tool. Simply type in your industry as a keyword, and you
will get dozens of related keywords shown to you. The goal is to find the one or two
main keywords as well as 5 category keywords that describe your website’s business
at its core. Quality rather than quantity is the concept. From an SEO perspective it
helps to dedicate one page on one topic rather than multiple ones.
The main point of doing the research is to:
• Find the right niche for yourself
• Discover your audience
• Who are the market leaders in this field?
• How many links to their domain?
• Have they been published?
• Can you match their price point and create value?
• Can you find a keyword matched domain name or come up with an good
brand name yourself?
• Your monetization route?
One of the best Internet Marketers in the world, Jeremy Schoemaker, has recently
released his ShoeMoney Tools 2.0 with some of the most powerful SEO and PPC
tools of today. It's really some of the best advice you'll ever get. These tools can help
you reduce the time you spend on research dramatically. Check them out, the trial
offer is just $9.95.
Sometimes investing in education or research tools can have immeasurable ROI to
your business. Nevertheless, make sure you get your money's worth, not every
single Internet Marketing book or education site is worth spending your money on.
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The ShoeMoney Tools have a much higher value than price and for most Marketers
they will be essentials.
The perfect website structure, also the perfect reversed Sales Funnel, more on this
later in this eBook.
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PLAN YOUR STRATEGIES FROM THE START
When you are starting a new website business, planning is of utmost importance.
I found it most efficient to plan with set deadlines, In the launch phase, it helps you
a lot to stay on track and in the day-to-day business it ensures that you complete the
necessary tasks.
Planning out your keyword strategy also helps; it is good if you have different topic
ideas available to you if you feel burnt out and can’t come up with something.
Writing a business plan also helps you ensure stability and provides a sort of
“fallback” when you are doing business. Write a business plan for each of your
website businesses to ensure long-term success.
However, all that planning can also push you off your game when something goes
wrong that you didn’t expect. After 12 years of working with Internet business, I can
let you know a little secret, most of the time something unexpected happens. There
is always something, like the server crashing right before you want to go online with
a new project or there is a major bug found a few days before the new software
should be released.
So when planning out your idea, create goals and pointers for your overall strategy
and be exact. Try to visualize your goal when you are planning designs, keywords
and other things you will not do yourself. Communication is the key!
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HAVE GOALS & BUDGET FOR EACH WEBSITE BUSINESS YOU START
It does not matter if you are starting one new website business or 200, you should
always create goals and a budget plan for each of them. Treating your website
business as a traditional business with a business plan, having accountability and a
long-term strategy will help you stay on track with your business so you don’t give
up the first time difficulties arise. When you are creating your goals and budget for
the new business you are starting, try to stay realistic because it won't be easy.
Therefore, when you have grasped a clear idea of your business concept, and have
done the due diligence on research and its potential, you will find you can set your
goals and budget more easily.
For example, a goal could be reaching the first page of Google for your top 10
keywords within the first year or write 3 blog posts a week or even something like go
to one local Industry meet up a month.
Your budget is also very important: don’t plan from money you don’t have or future
sales. In addition, something many unsuccessful website businesses seem to do is to
spend most of their money on everything except the IT department where the core
business success results from. Maintaining a website business costs approximately 5
times the work hours in a month than building it.
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OUTSOURCE SO YOU DON’T NEED TO CLONE YOURSELF
Cloning of humans is illegal in most of the world, so don’t even think about it but if
you do, let me know ;o)
Some people may think outsourcing is bad that will result in not so good results.
There is some truth to this but I will explain why outsourcing could work for you.
Outsourcing is emerging as the new form of employment for most Internet
professionals globally. These professionals offer services online, working from the
comfort of their own home and on their own schedule. Benefits include savings on
office space, insurance, health care, and other costs that can reduce the cost of the
necessary labour you need to start and maintain your business. You can practically
outsource everything in your business, rather than attempt to do everything
yourself. Outsourcing is not more than hiring qualified individuals, though
sometimes it happens that you will hire the wrong person like in any workplace.
Educating and building a relationship with your employees is important.
Communication and visualization is the key to successful outsourcing. I
recommended staying away from outsourcing companies, they are often worse than
slave owners, not all, but too many.
John Reese made millions with Internet Marketing and other online products he
published, and almost everything he does through outsourcing. He recently started a
great online course focused on outsourcing. The name of the course is Outsource
Force, and I urge you to check it out if you are planning to hire employees online.
I personally outsource whenever I can see that it would cost me more time doing it
myself. I have found putting a dollar value on my hour and charging myself for
everything helps me stay on track with projects.
Using Craigslist to find qualified help for your projects is ideal. The cost difference
between hiring from North America or Europe to somebody from the Philippines or
India is quite a bit, around 5 times in my experience for a similar level of technical
education.
So outsourcing programmers, designers, researchers, link builders and other
professionals in the Philippines or India can cost you approximately as much as
hiring one person locally. However, for specialized management level professionals, I
choose to look for somebody from North America or Europe.
Another tip is to consider hiring experts or very committed people you tend to meet
as you progress through your business venture. Having a handful of specialists in-
house managing your outsourced team can ensure shorter communication and
quicker results.
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INTERNET MARKETING ESSENTIALS
Finally, let’s talk about Internet Marketing. For many people it still seems mysterious
and with all the different Gurus telling you the latest industry secrets, it often
becomes quickly overwhelming. The secrets that are worthy of note are: Awareness,
Trust and Profit. You need awareness of your business to drive traffic to your
website; you need to be trustworthy so the visitors to your site convert and create
profit.
One of the biggest mistakes I see happening everyday is that businesses care only
about the current sale rather than trying to create loyal customers. A loyal customer
is a person who comes back to your business regularly and buys something else from
you. Selling to customers who already bought from you is a lot easier than making
the initial sale. That is very similar to the Mom & Pop store down the street. They
only survived by being friendly and nice to the few customers they have, so they
come back and feel good about it.
In a similar vein, creating awareness for your website business initially required
people to pay someone to get them links to their website since this is supposed to
increase organic traffic. That is generally the correct thing to do, but most of the
time, they get links from sites that are completely unrelated to their own business.
When Mom & Pop started out, would it have made sense for them to drive to the
next city 100 miles away and plaster the streets with posters for their store? No, it
would not. It would make sense to go and talk to the stores in town and create a
relationship with them. The store owners would then start recommending the Mom
& Pop store to their own customers since they know Mom & Pop and trust them.
Instead of going out and getting a million unrelated links to your site, you should be
smart and just go for the few leaders in your industry and build a relationship with
them. Do not be afraid to do something for them before you expect something in
return. With leaders of your industry recommending you, giving you a link, you
won't just gain trust with people who are interested in your industry, but you also
create trust with search engines since you are receiving links from industry leaders
related to your business.
Thus, Internet marketing is actually more about being social and human then being
technical and cruel. Every single good Internet Marketer will explain to you that
brand awareness, trust and returning customers are paramount.
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E-MAIL LIST – CAPTURE THESE LEADS & CONVERT THEM
Your email list will be the most important Internet marketing tool in your arsenal. It
provides you with the possibility to convert leads into sales, create relationships with
your customers and keep them informed about new products or services. By keeping
your customers informed, providing great customer service and value will no doubt
create continued growing income due to returning business. Happy returning
customers are the best income source for any business, by enabling a consistent
level of income monthly but also acting as invaluable promotional tools with word of
mouth advertising. This is more effective than a costly print or television ad
campaign. Building a good email list has been an important part of the Internet since
the dawn of the Internet with the ARPANET. E-mail was one of the very first
protocols in use and its function has not really changed much in the past 40 years.
Don't fix what ain't broke, right? What has changed is the amount of people using
the Internet, almost every person has at least two email addresses in use, one
personal and one for work. Even with the rise of social networking, the amount of
email communication has still increased. Unfortunately, email spam has also
increased so much over the past few years that it really has become a huge issue for
most email providers and email users. Spam is bad and Spammers are one of the
worst kinds of people running around on the Internet. Becoming a spammer has also
become much easier than a few years ago. All the large email providers have joined
up to build a global blacklist of emails, IPs and domain names that having been
marked once as spammer, all send out emails will be marked as spam immediately
and will force negative results in the organic search engine rankings as well as PPC
quality source. So being on the blacklist can destroy your business within a day.
Protect your business by ensuring you avoid these activities:
• Sending emails everyday or every hour to your email list, sometimes weekly is too
much
• Not using double opt-in and failing to let people unsubscribe
• Sending emails from your home pc
• Sending emails from your dedicated Server that is wrongly configured, allowing
hackers to use your server as relay server or has a bad Subnet neighbourhood
• Dedicated Server not being white listed
• Sending out HTML emails with high Spam score
• Sending out too many E-Mails. People react badly when they get emails they didn’t
ask for.
One of the best strategies I have found is actually very simple and easy to follow.
Offer visitors signing up to double opt-in to your newsletter as a visible sign-up box
in your side navigation, and when they make a comment. Integrating it to get sign
ups per RSS subscription, Facebook friends and Twitter Followers to your email list.
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Most importantly, ask all visitors who convert into customers to join your list to keep
them informed.
As soon as they have signed up, send a thank you email via Autoresponder to the
new subscriber and offer them something free with value to them to show your
appreciation of them signing up.
Now you start building a relationship with your subscribers, like in the Mom & Pop
business from the earlier example, and by providing value to your customers, it can
make a significant boost to your website business. Building a relationship with your
customers is not bombarding them with useless emails nor calling them
unexpectedly to tell them about your newest great product. If you have ever picked
up a book about sales or management I am sure you have read about building trust
first. Being polite, helpful and asking them before telling them what they want will
help you in building a long-term relationship with your customers.
A great tool for your email list strategy is to use a Web based email marketing
software like Aweber. They ensure that your newsletters are delivered, taking care of
the subscribes and unsubscribes automatically. It has an industry leading
Autoresponder system , allowing you to integrate with every web platform easily, as
well as RSS subscription and PayPal and over 135 free and easy to modify HTML E-
Mail Templates. Test-drive them for just $1 for the first month.
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SEO – GET TRAFFIC ORGANICALLY
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is what will bring most of your traffic. Search
engines are and will be what most Internet users will use to find the right
information, services or products that they are looking for.
As I explained in the Research your Business Idea section, knowing and focusing on
the right keywords that are related to your business is fundamental to your website
business.
The most important on-page attributes for SEO is:
• Page Title – that should be an eye-catching sentence of around 60
characters
• Meta Description – Short description of the page’s relevancy to targeted
terms to attracted visitors with around 160 characters
• URL – using the target keyword in your url
• H1 or H2 tag – these are attention attributes for search engines
• Being relevant to the topic, useful, helpful and of value to the visitor. Create
short pages for each topic rather than one long page about multiple topics
There are many more SEO attributes that can have a positive or negative effect on
your ranking but the above ones are the most important and in many ways, the
safest ones to use.
Localization:
To date, one of the most important ranking factors is site speed and localization. This
will become even more important in the near future. This is because our population
is always growing, and studies have shown that most Internet users, 86% tend to
search for things they can actually do locally. That is one of the reasons why social
networking has become so extremely popular all over the world. You can now search
with your iPhone or Android to find a store near you and check their inventory
before you even step into the store and start searching for it. One way to use this to
your advantage is to have your website hosted in your area to reduce the connection
time for your visitors. Also, spending money on decent hosting that does not go
offline every few days is very beneficial in the end for your business. Use localized
keywords in your website if possible; relevance is the key to great search engine
ranking. What works for humans normally works for search engines as well.
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Site structure & duplicate content:
Duplicate content is the downfall of most websites. The larger they grow, the more
the content gets duplicated, not just by other websites but more often on the
website itself. When the flow of new content stops the ranking will slowly go away
since the site structure distributes the page rank to only the important pages and
then gets lost to the duplications. The reason for this is often that there is no real
site structure followed on the long run. One structure that has been in place since
the start of the Internet is the folder pyramid site structure. Each of your biggest
traffic keywords becomes it’s own category / folder with subfolders and product /
high converting pages in each of them. With the rise of dynamic websites, this often
has been ignored by developers but the best practice is to give each of your pages a
unique URL. For example, you are a dentist in Vancouver so you would want your
site structure to look like this so that it will still be valid in two decades:
Www.KerryTheDentist.ca – your home page
Www.KerryTheDentist.ca/teeth-whitening/ - one of the categories
Www.KerryTheDentist.ca/teeth-whitening/laser/ - a subcat
Www.KerryTheDentist.ca/teeth-whitening/laser/dentist-white-teeth-with-laser-whitening.hml - the article you
published about this topic.
Duplicated content can be created with simple mistakes like forgetting to 301
redirect the second domain name or the non-www to your actual domain. Try to
avoid these pitfalls.
Link Building:
Link building is considered one of the most contentious issues in the SEO
community. Links are important for your website business. They are like highway ads
leading a customer to your outlet, or the befriended business from Mom & Pop. A
link is like a recommendation of somebody so it should be treated with much value.
Over the past years, search engines have demonstrated a trend towards looking at
the where is the link coming from. Is it related to what you are doing? Is the content
around the link positive or negative? Do you link to the owner of this website in
some way? Have you bought the link or is it natural? Does the link have any editorial
value?
There are many ways to build strong links. For example, there are directory
submissions, or RSS for your blog. You can create articles, video or audio content and
publish it on other websites like Wiki, Squeeze, Hubpages or personal blogs which
have a related topic. However, the best links come from happy customers who want
to share their experience about you with the world, those are the links you want.
Always try to build deep links to your product pages rather than just to your
homepage and your few target pages.
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SALES FUNNEL – CONTENT IS PRIZED AND CONVERSION IS KING
Fresh content is very important. Adding fresh content creates links to your site, gives
your visitors a reason to return and allows you to build your brand as well as
awareness for your business. However, even the best content does not help much if
it does not convert. When you create content for your website, it helps to keep the
Sales Funnel in mind as it works very well with the pyramid site.
As you can see, the Pyramid site structure already creates somewhat of a sales
funnel. Generally, visitors don’t become customers of your business the first time
they find your homepage. It won’t happen until you have cultivated enough trust in
your business to make a purchase. So building your sales funnel with content that
converts is very important. Don’t be afraid to ask for help from friends and
customers when you encounter issues selling your products. Always ask how you can
improve their experience.
You cannot fail as long you are trying; you only fail when you stop. Being honest and
maybe sometimes being personal can help customers connect with you.
When using Google Analytics, you can see how traffic flows into your business. For
example, your homepage has probably the most amount of traffic out of all your
webpages but may have the lowest conversion rate. The deeper you dig into your
site, you might notice that you only have a handful of people visiting the page but 2
– 3 of them actually convert.
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Secret tip: The power of deep pages:
http://www.bgtheory.com/blog/are-search-queries-becoming-even-more-unique-statistics-from-google/
Over 20% of Googles Broad search queries each day are new or haven’t been done in
the past 6 month. 70% of the Broad queries have no exact-matched keywords and
over 50% of user queries are greater then three words. Since it is almost impossible
to rank for a Broad keyword, which would be when your pages show up every time
somebody types-in a Keyword phrase combined with unique words it has become
best practise to target exact keywords. But you can only find approximately 30% of
the exact-matched keywords in your Keyword research tools. This means that it is
important that your Product / Services / Content pages are indexed and have page
rank to support the pages above. Instead of building links just to your Homepage or
Category pages you should focus at least 75% on building links to your deep pages so
that you can use internal linking to reach higher ranking for your top keywords. Sure,
it is harder to do it this way but in the future, this will help you prevail when other
fails.
My friend Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com has created the best SEO/SEM Training and
Community I know of, the information in the member’s only area is priceless. Here I
learned how to connected the dots of Internet Marketing and I still see him as the
greatest Mentor I ever had.
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PPC – PAY FOR TRAFFIC THAT CONVERTS
PPC or Pay Per Click is the most common form of Internet marketing and growing
exponentially every year. Every major search engine and most larger websites offer
their own PPC system like Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter or Facebook. PPC can be
used to drive highly converting traffic to your business and sometimes can make
enough conversions to ensure a stable cash flow. I also know of businesses that are
completely based on their lead creation on paid traffic. However, PPC can quickly be
detrimental to your advertising budget without creating results if not done correctly.
Geotargeted Ads:
One of the most useful ways of targeting the right traffic with PPC is the use of Geo
Ads. Geo targeted ads are ads you make directly for one region like New York or
Vancouver. Using the same example of the Vancouver dentist, you would not want
to pay for any ads that are displayed anywhere else than in Vancouver, BC, Canada
since a person in New York would most likely not have much interest to come and
visit your business. Or let’s say you are a shopping cart business and you prefer
customers from the USA at the moment since it would cost more and take longer to
send your products to let’s say the UK. You would select then the United States as
your Geo target zone in your PPC Tool.
Ensure that your ads are running in the right Geotargeted location so you don’t
waste money on nonsense traffic or leads.
Quality Score:
Over the past few years, a new factor has started to become more important for PPC
advertisers and that is the quality score. With a low quality score, you can quickly
end up paying multiple times the amount of other advertisers with high quality
Score. The quality score is combined from how related your keywords are to your
landing page, how well optimized your page is for search engines, any malware on
your site, do you spam with emails or other communication avenues, amongst other
factors. In simple terms, search engines are trying to take a more human approach
to paid advertising as well as indirectly forcing you to provide quality and usefulness
to their customers to reduce spam and fraud.
PPC in Video Marketing:
One of the largest growing mediums on the internet are videos. PPC can be used to
display ads in videos or video clips before or during videos. This will quickly become
the replacement for TV ads. Start using PPC in your videos now so you have an
advantage against your competitors.
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PPC has gained much complexity in recent years and should not be taken lightly. It
reigns as the most powerful marketing tool to drive instant traffic to any website. It
is also being used to optimize your long-term SEO strategy right from the beginning.
PPCBlog.com offers great free advice as well as a paid training lesson community
where you can learn all the knowledge you need to run successful PPC campaigns on
any platform. You should check it out.
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SOCIAL MARKETING – CONNECT AND BE SOCIAL
Social Marketing has become a heavyweight in connecting with potential & current
customers of your business. Many believed that this started recently with the rise of
Web 2.0 but in reality, it has been around for almost as long as the Internet. Names
were different back then. You used message boards / forums rather than Facebook,
or Chats / IRC rather than Twitter but for the longest time people have used the
Internet to socially connect with each other to share information, knowledge or
services. I made my very first internet sales over a forum about dedicated servers.
When I registered my account there I just got my first dedicated server and tried to
set it up myself but had too little knowledge regarding Linux server at that point. I
ran into some snags and needed to ask for some help. Instead of just asking every
time I had an issue, I only posted when I could not find a solution on my own. Often I
came across other people who had similar problems and whenever I found a
solution I posted it as answers for the people with the same issue. Within a few
weeks, starting as pretty much a complete Noob on Dedicated Server, I created a
reputation within the German game hosting community for being an expert on
Dedicated Server and Game Server Configurations.
The reason I just shared this with you is that the same principle can be used by any
one, in any niche and at any time. The social aspect of the Internet can be the
deciding factor in how quickly you can accomplish your goals. People are generally
lazy, we don’t want to do more then we absolutely need too. Helping people who
have an issue can create long lasting friendships or business partnerships simply for
the reason that you have helped somebody. By answer questions or providing help
to others can help establish yourself quickly as an expert in your niche. Being viewed
as an expert is normally the result that other people take you more serious and are
more inclined to buy something from you or start a business relationship with you.
Being social on the Internet:
For many it is much easier to overcome the natural shyness when connecting with
other over the Internet, after you meet somebody on the internet it is often much
easier to meet with them in person since a baseline relationship has already has
been established.
The one thing to remember for a truly effective social marketing campaign is that it
is all about being social. This means that it is not about you, your product or services
but rather, it is about other, society and all the people around you.
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PUBLIC RELATIONS – HELP OTHERS GET BIG BY HELPING BACK
Using public relations practices can have a much bigger effect on your business than
almost any other traditional marketing method. Google built most of their business
on public relations rather than spending huge dollars on advertisement budgets.
Methods you should implement include press releases related to company activities.
Sending out PR for your yearly summer sale will most likely not get you much
attention in the media but perhaps something that will garner you attention is a
notice sent out about your company’s donation, to a good cause, of 50% of all
revenue from your yearly summer sale.
Consider granting exclusive interviews or behind the scenes views to journalists that
have built a previous relationship with you and your company. This can result in
media attention. Do not give it all away but give enough so people are interested in
it. The trick here is not to go after mainstream media directly but rather connect
with leaders in your industry and give them the exclusive. Mainstream will then
jump on the bandwagon and report about it if the topic has created enough interest.
Mainstream media has been forced to keep up with social media which means that if
there is good reception in the social media arena, it will likely cross over to print, TV
or radio. You can also do very well with indirect public relations by not
demonstrating direct influence on the media. One of the easiest ways of doing
indirect Public Relations is supporting non-profit organizations, local causes,
research, aid relief efforts or schools as well as youth teams and organizations. Most
of these kinds of organizations are only able to survive if they can rally enough
people for their cause, and they are very happy to tell everybody who supports
them.
Let me try to give you a real life example:
Using our dentist in Vancouver example, instead of spending lots of money on some
flyers that end up in the garbage anyway, he could create a yearly contest for the
schools in his area with a prize where one child per year can win braces for free.
Only thing they need to do is to go to the squeeze page and fill their name, email,
school and upload a picture of their teeth. Many parents will be interested in
something like this to save a few dollars but the real idea behind it is that at the end
of the contest you send out an email blast announcing the winner but still give
everybody else a great offer that will be hard to resist. Try offers like get free teeth
cleaning with every yearly check-up or free braces assessment with each check-up.
With this, you will be able to support your local community as well as maybe help
out a few kids who are not as well off as others but the end result will be the same:
more customers and trust is created. If you think in terms of how to help within your
means, it will be the best PR you could hope for and often doesn’t cost you as much
as traditional advertising types.
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SETUP ALL ESSENTIALS AND START YOUR WEBSITE BUSINESS
Each website business has essentials that you need that are important to run your
business as well as making your life a lot easier. These should be setup before you
really launch your website business. I refer to this as the Beta stage of your business.
This can be used to determine if you are on the right track with your business as well
as to ensure that when you start the real work with your business then things will
run smoother. To be blunt with you, nothing will help you more with this than
experience. The more businesses that you launch you will find things will get easier
and more routine without so much drama. There is no fact that has remained more
timeless then “Shit happens, fix it, communicate to others”.
If you expect that things will always go as planned you will work yourself up about
nothing, yes there are times where things go downhill faster than you can say shit,
but in reality keeping a cool head and focusing on what is next to solve the issue has
often resulted in the best results.
Research:
Before you start your website business, do all possible research on your business
idea, competitors, the market or niche as well as keywords.
Design:
Pay for a custom design for your site where you own the psd and it can’t be
reproduced. Use your competition research to establish standardized design
elements, colors and icons. Get corporate designs such as logos / templates from the
same source in order to create continuity. 99designs.com is a great place to get
designs for your website business.
Domain & Hosting:
I generally recommended that your hosting is separate from your domain account. In
the event something happens with your host provider then you are still in control of
your domains and you can easily point them to another host. In addition, it is
generally a good idea to go with larger domain providers than smaller ones for
better security reasons. Get an account and purchase your domains with a company
like GoDaddy.com because they have a great price point. With hosting I would
recommend to looking for a reasonable local hosting offer that includes server
hosted in a good data center in your area. You will be amazed what you can get from
a small hosting company, I actually prefer them.
Web platform:
In reality, for 90% of all business, there is an easy to customize solution that can be
used which is already in existence. More often than you expect there will be an
OpenSource system that will cover most of your needs. Sometimes Sometimes a
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custom development, or at least a partial custom development, will be needed. This
really depends on what your needs are. I really like the Wordpress platform and for
most cases, it offers all the plugins that are needed to build any kind of website
business. For larger ecommerce sites, or other web applications, I think custom is
more often the way to go. Since you still end up with large customization efforts
even with opensource products like Magento that are offering extensive
functionality.
Email accounts and newsletter:
It looks a lot better when you have you@yourdomain.com as your Email address,
you can either add your business Email to your Gmail or Live account by using Email
forward from your hosting company or domain account. I personally have Google
Apps accounts, where I can just add any domain/business whenever I want. It keeps
things separate but still in the same place. Also, get an Aweber account and setup
your email list and newsletter system right from the start.
Accounts and money:
Okay, I’m not a financial advisor by any means, however keeping your business and
private life separate can help immensely with your success. Having a separate
account for each business to keep control and track of everything is helpful and
keeps things honest. Treat yourself like an employee, pay yourself a wage and
change it only once a year. Having an accounting professional doing your books can
help as well, you will be surprised how easy it is to find a local person to do it for you
for a reasonable price, just put an ad on Craigslist.
Setting up all your accounts:
There are hundreds of large websites that want you to have an account with them
like Google, Yahoo and Facebook. These accounts hold some great value and should
be registered as soon as you have found your business name. This will take time and
effort to do but the payoff is great. Most of these sites allow you at least one back
link, as well as allowing you to connect to your Facebook, Twitter accounts and your
RSS feed from your website for updates. Occasionally, these sites are also great for
picking up a few new clients. If you have subscribed to my newsletter you will
receive my free must-have Internet Accounts Checklist in the next few days.
Directory Submission:
There are still a few Internet directories with value that could help your business
succeed. For example DOMZ, Yahoo Directory, BotW and business.com are paid
directories that have a large ROI and long-term value. Also, local directories can be
very useful for your website.
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You should now be close to setting up and moving forward with starting your
website business. Have you asked your friends to test your site, newsletter and all
the other things for you? It’s time to start the launch process.
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GET READY TO LAUNCH IN 10, 9, 8 …
There are many types of launches on the internet and they are used in almost every
niche. Launching your products, services or whatever you can think of is a simple
way to create attention to your new product as well as expanding your network of
internet friends who help you with your website business. Sure, like with everything
on the Internet you should not over do it, changing the layout of your website every
month and relaunching it will quickly lead to people being annoyed with you.
Most likely you are wondering right now why I am talking about the launch process
after I recommended bringing your site online? I expect that you are at the start or
middle of your website business at the moment. If you haven’t already built yourself
a network of people, who are likely to support what you are planning to launch,
there would not be much sense in launching. Here is a helpful launch checklist:
1. Research what your customers and niche needs
2. Produce what you found is missing
3. Talk to your network of friends who are interested in your niche and ask for help
with launching your product; in return you would let them try it for free or with a
large discount.
4. Talk to leaders / Gurus in your Industry and ask them if they have the same issue
and that you have built a solution for it and you would be happy to be in a joint
venture with them. For example, using an affiliate program so they get 10%, 20% or
even 75% of the sale in every sale they produce is a simple way of sharing.
5. You will then provide the commercial material for it to all your JV partners, like
email templates, squeeze pages, videos, articles and so on.
6. Set a date for the launch start and the actual release and inform your partners and
network about it including any changes.
7. Schedule your pre-launch procedure and sync it with your Partners, this should not
be longer than one week from the first blast going out until release date to ensure
that the anticipation you are creating is not gone when your actual release date
comes.
8. On release date, expect a 48-hour day to deal with all the little issues that will come
out right at the wrong time.
9. Follow up with your customers and interested people in your newly extended
network to survey their needs and how you can improve or help.
10. Start with the preparation for next year’s launch.
Doing a product launch is one of the most useful marketing strategies, and it does
not matter what media you are using to get your point across. I’m sure you
remember the iPad launch just a couple a months ago or how car makers been doing
it for years. People love product launches, and this will not change any time soon.
It’s also hard for me to say no to the excitement of owning something that nobody
else has yet. Learning about product launches and how they work as well as doing
some on your own to get experience will help to make all future launches better.
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Jeff Walker, a great Internet Marketer, built a training program that deals with how
to launch your products. This program is called Product Launch Formula. It is a great
resource that can increase your business, so dramatically, within a few weeks that
you will wonder “how did I ever live without product launches.”
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http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc
NOW THE REAL WORK STARTS
At this stage, the daily grind will start. If you stop working on improving your
website your business will disappear as fast as it appeared. Motivating yourself,
especially if you are handling most tasks at home alone, can be extremely frustrating
and depressing. You will often feel that nothing is going right and everything seems
to be an uphill battle. Even successful website business owners face the same
problem only there are more people involved. Be careful not to face burnout and
don’t try to do everything alone all at once.
The 80 – 20 Rule:
We humans are something special and most of us can’t even imagine how much
potential is in each of us. The 80 – 20 rule is defined as 80% the world’s income is
produced by 20% of the world’s population or in other terms 80% of the work you
get done in a day you can get done in 20% of your working time. If you managed to
focus 20% of your daily time, let’s say 4-5 hours on improving your website, then
your business will improve dramatically. Soon you will hire or outsource to others, to
do the things you don’t want to do. Only work 20% of the day to run and improve
your business and spend the rest of the day on the beach, drinking bloodwine then
you will get more done while being more effective.
Focus on your strengths and give the remaining tasks to others:
One thing all successful entrepreneurs have done since the beginning of time is to
outsource work they can’t do or they are not good at. You can’t learn all the skills
needed to run a larger successful business completely on your own. You will end up
with trying rather than getting things done. This will frustrate you since it feels like
you are not getting closer to your goals. It is very important to understand how your
business works and to have an overview of what is going on at any given time,
without it you could end up losing money. By hiring people to do a specific job like
create a design package for you or setup a WordPress, you can expedite your goals
and focus on gettin’ ‘er done.
When I do client work, I always outsource things like design, content and
programming to other people who are specialized in these fields. It reduces my
workload since I would rather manage projects than doing the lag work but the
greatest advantage is that I am much more productive.
The day-to-day work will be where the real work needs to continue: create links,
publish new content, send out email blasts at regular intervals to stay in contact with
your customers as well as to ensure. To do it all on your own you would need to
work for five people, which will burn you out. So try to outsource one part of your
business at a time to one person who is specialized in this particular skill. For
http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke
http://twitter.com/FalkoInc
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc
example, if you found a great programmer and you have an easy time working with
him you should ask him for an Annual Maintenance Contract which is around 40% of
the initial programming cost so he does updates and little changes on the site when
needed. Accounting - if this is not your thing why would you want to spend hours
with it? Sure, you may save a few dollars in the short term but how much does your
hour cost? Remember earlier when I said you should treat yourself like an employee
right from the beginning? Could you not use your time better with improving your
business? Like writing articles or building links or ensuring that all your processes
work correctly.
When the real work starts, stay on course, think about the long-term and focus on
what is important that you can do it yourself easily and outsource everything else so
you do not burn out.
http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke
http://twitter.com/FalkoInc
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc
BECOME A MASTER, MY YOUNG PADAWAN
After you dedicated your life to something, created and carried passion for an
industry, you will have gained knowledge as well as a respectable viewpoint of
things. You have become a Master of your domain. In the olden days, it often took
30 years an Apprentice to became a Master, which often stays true even today.
When school is over, there should not be a day where you do not learn something
new. After learning about one industry and mastering different elements of it, you
can become a Master or Guru. As I said before, taking one niche/topic in one
industry at a time will ensure success. There is nobody who will teach you
everything, only experience does.
However, when you have succeeded in mastering your topic as well as you are able
to show that you have produced quality work, there is no reason why you would not
want to showcase it. The most important part of the Guru status is to teach others
what you have learned. Do you think Luke would have been sent to find Master Yoda
in Star Wars V - The Empire Strikes back if Master Yoda would have never thought
anybody before? Simply no, there would have been nobody who would have known
about Yoda, nor to tell his tales. Sorry for my Nerdienizum, but the point of it is that
the legend of a person’s roots is in his / her followers, believers, students or
Facebook friends. Sharing is caring if you want to build a Guru status for yourself.
You need to share your knowledge with others and try to teach it to some. The
Internet has given any person the possibility to publish himself, whether with an
eBook or blog, the possibility is yours. However, after reaching your Guru status, you
need to keep on going; sure, 15 minutes of fame can change your life but ensuring a
long-term successful business even beyond your life can be more satisfying.
Take on your own apprentices:
When you are a Master and run a successful business, there no reason why you
should not find yourself a young, passionate individual who would enjoy learning the
trade from you. Taking on apprentices can help to create a legend that will carry on
long after your body has turned to dust. If you can build a great working relationship
with your apprentices, they will be grateful for your guidance. Even after they have
left your safe arms, separation and change is a normal part of life and should be
expected. Sure, it takes energy, money and time to teach another person about your
trade but if they go on to another city and do a fabulous job people will ask where
they have learned their skills and your apprentice will humbly answer and build your
reputation far beyond your own possibilities. Building your legend by teaching
others can ensure wealth forever. Become a Master, my Padawan.
http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke
http://twitter.com/FalkoInc
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc
SUMMING THIS UP
Whether you are starting a website business or already running one, you should
never forget what is working and never lose sight of what is coming. Your passion
combined with knowledge and your time can create a website business that will
secure you a monthly income that nobody can take away from you. That is exactly
what it will take you to build awareness as well as trust to create a successful
website business. There are neither short cuts nor quick solutions that will
guarantee your success. There is only YOU, who can make your dream come true,
only you who can find the right people to make things happe, only you to learn and
to GET ‘ER DONE.
Nobody who had success on the Internet had it easy. Most successful Internet
entrepreneurs have spent countless hours working on new ways to create
awareness, trying out different designs or products and services that their customers
would like. Even if they reach fame and wealth, they often still spend more time
building their business than the average internet user.
If things don’t go your way, why not try a different approach? When Thomas Edison
invented the light bulb he said that he needed over 10,000 tries to get it right, but he
never failed.
http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke
http://twitter.com/FalkoInc
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc
THANK YOU
First, I wanted to thank you dear reader. I hope you enjoyed reading this book as
much as I had writing it and hope I may have taught you one or two new things you
didn’t know about before.
I want to thank my Mother, Cordula, for all the help, motivation, energy and ass
kicks she has given me in my life. I could not imagine a day without your wisdom and
understanding. Thank you for being there for me whenever I needed it.
Thank you, Roselyn for fighting your way through my horrible dyslexic writing to
make it readable for others. I know you are a big reason why my English is where it is
now and I will never forget this.
Aaron Wall, for your amazing information you give away, all the questions you
answered and for all the support you have given me to launch myself into the SEM
market, thank you so much!
Chadwick Conte, for all the help and the great working partnership we have created
over the past years. Your input is very important to me.
IBM, which taught me so much about IT and business that I could have never
learned anywhere else. It is truly one of the most amazing companies in the world.
As well as the only one I would join!
Thank you all for being there for me!

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Website Business 101 - The Timeless Secrets of Successful Internet Business

  • 2. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc Contents Website Business 101 .................................................................................................. 1 COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER ............................4 Disclaimer......................................................4 FALKO, WHO ARE YOU? .................................................................................................... 5 WHY DID YOU WRITE THIS EBOOK AND GIVE IT AWAY FREE?................................................. 6 RESOURCES USED IN THIS EBOOK ...................................................................................... 7 WEBSITE BUSINESS VS “BRICK AND MORTAR” BUSINESS ..................................................... 8 WHY MOST WEBSITE BUSINESSES FAIL TO MAKE MONEY .................................................... 10 SELECTING YOUR WEBSITE BUSINESS MODEL .................................................................... 11 Content Publishing:.....................................11 Professional services website:.....................11 eCommerce Store:.......................................12 Education Services: .....................................12 Software Development: ..............................13 FINDING THE RIGHT BUSINESS IDEA FOR YOURSELF............................................................ 14 RESEARCHING YOUR BUSINESS IDEA................................................................................. 15 PLAN YOUR STRATEGIES FROM THE START..........17 HAVE GOALS & BUDGET FOR EACH WEBSITE BUSINESS YOU START ...................................... 18 OUTSOURCE SO YOU DON’T NEED TO CLONE YOURSELF...................................................... 19 INTERNET MARKETING ESSENTIALS.................................................................................. 20 E-MAIL LIST – CAPTURE THESE LEADS & CONVERT THEM................................................... 21 SEO – GET TRAFFIC ORGANICALLY.................................................................................. 23 Localization:.................................................23 Site structure & duplicate content:.............24
  • 3. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc Link Building:...............................................24 SALES FUNNEL – CONTENT IS PRIZED AND CONVERSION IS KING........................................ 25 PPC – PAY FOR TRAFFIC THAT CONVERTS.......................................................................... 27 Geotargeted Ads:.........................................27 Quality Score:..............................................27 PPC in Video Marketing: .............................27 SOCIAL MARKETING – CONNECT AND BE SOCIAL ............................................................... 29 Being social on the Internet:.......................29 PUBLIC RELATIONS – HELP OTHERS GET BIG BY HELPING BACK ........................................... 30 SETUP ALL ESSENTIALS AND START YOUR WEBSITE BUSINESS............................................... 31 Research:.....................................................31 Design:.........................................................31 Domain & Hosting:......................................31 Web platform: .............................................31 Email accounts and newsletter: ..................32 Accounts and money:..................................32 Directory Submission: .................................32 GET READY TO LAUNCH IN 10, 9, 8 … ............................................................................. 34 NOW THE REAL WORK STARTS......................................................................................... 36 The 80 – 20 Rule:.........................................36 BECOME A MASTER, MY YOUNG PADAWAN...................................................................... 38 Take on your own apprentices: ...................38 SUMMING THIS UP ........................................................................................................ 39 THANK YOU .................................................................................................................. 40
  • 4. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER Copyright 2010 by Falko Luedtke. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any Information storage and retrieval system, without permission in written from the Author, Falko Luedtke (except for the reviewer, who may quote brief passages and/ or short brief video clips in a review.) Disclaimer The Author, Falko Luedtke, makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaims all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. The Author shall not be liable for damages arising here from. The fact that an organization or website is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the Author endorses the information the organization or website may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet websites listed in the work might have changed.
  • 5. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc FALKO, WHO ARE YOU? Thank you for downloading my first eBook. My name is Falko Luedtke. I was born and raised in Berlin, Germany. I moved 4 years ago, around the time of my writing this book, from Berlin to Vancouver, B.C., Canada on my own. I arrived here without being able to speak much English. I had decided to immigrate to learn English and explore my possibilities halfway around the globe. Now I’m a permanent resident of Canada and I hope to be a Citizen within a few years. I work as a Strategic Internet Marketer and have just finished writing my first eBook that you are now reading. My Career in IT started when I was 6 years old. My father purchased the first commonly available 386 PC in Germany in early 1990. A few months later, when I had learned the basics of how a computer works, I noticed my father tinkering, with the hardware, unsuccessfully to install a sound card. I decided to take the computer apart and fix the issue myself so I could play Industry Tycoon. You should have seen my mother’s face checking on me when she came home! I was glad I figured this all out before my Dad arrived. :o) Since then, you can not really tear me away from computers. I found it often made much more sense than most people around me did. Over a half year before graduation from school in 2001, I was selected out of over 20,000 candidates for one of the 20 spots as an IBM apprentice. In recent years, I have helped companies around the world to achieve higher traffic and profits from their website business. I am writing a blog at http://falkoinc.com as well as developing some of my own projects and working with a few selected clients on projects. This eBook is meant to help people get an overview of how to start a website business, what is involved in making your presence known on the Internet and monetizing your opportunity. Since the eBook is meant to be rather helpful and short versus long and boring, I will recommend more reading material whenever possible. I will also publish more advanced and detailed articles on my blog, at http://falkoinc.com/blog If you have any questions about this book and content in it or face an issue that I could help you with, please feel free to contact me on my site, Twitter or Facebook. I’m looking forward to getting to know you. Thank you again for downloading this eBook, website business 101, the Timeless Secrets of successful Internet business. I hope it will help you to succeed in your website business.
  • 6. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc WHY DID YOU WRITE THIS EBOOK AND GIVE IT AWAY FREE? I believe sharing is caring, so the main reason I wrote this book is to share my knowledge with the world and hope that my readers can use the new skills they learned to improve their life. I also hope to meet people who I can exchange knowledge with and may be able to call them friends one day. I guess the ultimate goal of this eBook is that one person who reads it improves their life dramatically. Sure, everybody wants to be rich but this is not a get rich scheme or a guide to making millions of dollars a day without doing anything. If you are expecting this out of the book, don’t bother to read any further, this book is not for you. Do know that it will take much of your personal time, a lot of dedication and passion for what you do to start your own business. I wish you the best of luck and hope that this eBook helps you in your life’s adventures. This eBook is simply the knowledge I have gathered over the past 20 years about IT. The content in this eBook has been proven to work since I first used them at the dawn of dynamic web development and search engines over 12 years ago. Most of the book is technical, but I will try not to make it too boring. ;o) If you have any recommendation on how I can improve it, I would love to hear from you.
  • 7. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc RESOURCES USED IN THIS EBOOK Within this eBook, I will refer to different tools, services and people that I use and follow. These are services I truly believe in and strongly recommend to my friends and clients to use to improve their knowledge. You can never know enough, you can only not share enough. Aweber Analytics Adwords Blog Profit Camp Google Apps SEO Book Training and Community ShoeMoney.com Winning the Web Outsource Force OM4 – Managed Wordpress hosting Wordpress
  • 8. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc WEBSITE BUSINESS VS “BRICK AND MORTAR” BUSINESS In the first decade of the 21st Century, our society has innovated 100 times a month more then in the 20th Century. We went from riding horses to flying to the Moon and we invented the Internet in the 20th Century; think about what will be possible within our lifetime. Some of our advancement in technology and medicine has also created some of our biggest social and economic issues. 100 years ago the human population was at 1.5 billion, a few weeks ago UNICEF released the latest population estimates and it’s approaching 6.7 billion. This has created a huge economic impact, seen with the Great Recession of 2008 and the still very unstable economy. With respect to the baby boomer generation, being forced to hang on to their jobs a lot longer than they expected before retirement, there is a difficult burden created for young talents to learn the lessons they need to have for a long and successful career. In addition, banks are rather difficult with lending money to young entrepreneurs and the cost of leasing a space, filling it with furniture and stock is just too high for most young talents to do their work, plus there can only be so many Starbucks on the corners :). For most, the solution is simple, start a website business, make money online. Everybody is talking about it; everybody seems to make money with it, why shouldn’t you? Truly, the Internet has given us a complete new marketplace where we can show our products in completely new ways and sell them to almost 70% of the human population. Nevertheless, do not be fooled by people telling you that you can start a moneymaking machine within hours and that you only need to pay $9 a month to make it happen. They are lying to you as well as making money from you. To achieve success in this competitive marketplace, you need to be willing to spend enormous amounts of time learning and understanding, as well as socially interacting with your industry online. It cost money but compared to the cost of traditional start up costs for a local store, it is much lower and really depends on your expertise and capability of learning new things. It could be as low as a few hundred dollars, it could be much more than the cost of a traditional start-up. All depending on what your business idea is. The costs of starting a successful local store in a city like Vancouver for the first 2 years of business are around $300,000, which would include a lease on the location, décor, inventory, employees, marketing and many other things as well as YOU working 24/7 and not being able to stop which is why you call it self-employed. If you would take the same amount of money and start a virtual company, you could do the following things for the first two years. You could handle the legal work like
  • 9. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc incorporating yourself, hire a young talented development person out of University, hire a graduate in the field of communication, as well as a young talented designer and build 5 different website businesses with drop shippers so you don’t waste your money on inventory. This should leave you at least $100k as marketing budget. Building a virtual business is a lot more affordable than a traditional business with a local storefront or manufacturing space. An online business promises much more possibilities for growth. Creating a website business you can easily reach 10 or 100 times the amount of interested visitors in a month than you could have with a physical store. That also means you could potentially sell 10 times the amount of products that you could possibly do offline. That is where one of the larges issues in Website Business comes in play, the Monetization of your website, current statistic suggest that less then 10% of the website online are actually making income. The rest of the sites online never make a dime.
  • 10. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc WHY MOST WEBSITE BUSINESSES FAIL TO MAKE MONEY Many people run out of money and patience before they make enough money to sustain themselves. They might get frustrated with what they are doing when they don’t immediately achieve success with it. Alternatively, they hire people who are unreliable, cheap and do not get the job done. There are many different reasons why things do not work out as planned but often the main reason why this happens is the “Owner”, if he even has a plan, has lost sight of it and isn’t following it. To simplify it for a moment: failing to plan is planning to fail and not sticking to the plan is even worse. Working from home, being alone most of the day, sitting in front of your computer all day, not showered, in your pajamas and getting distracted by the wasteful amount of information and pleasure at your fingertips. It is hard to follow your plan, I know I have been there. For me, it seems that one thing that really helps me is creating set routines so that I always have something to do next. It really helps if you treat your website business as a traditional business from the very first day. Separate your work from your private life, and have a private life. You can’t just work all day, that is not healthy either. Finding balance in life and focusing on what is in front of you will help you the most to succeed with your plans. Passion and an iron will to succeed will help you find motivation even if you feel like there is nothing left; if you say you CAN NOT you still have 70% left, so move it.
  • 11. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc SELECTING YOUR WEBSITE BUSINESS MODEL One of the hardest challenges most of my clients encounter is knowing exactly what it is their website should do. It seems like many people try to reinvent the wheel rather than using existing tools and methods that have been proven to work. Content Publishing: Content publishing is the simplest form of a website business. By this I mean that you are using your website to publish unique content and it either makes money from ads on your site or from affiliate marketing. As an example, a Blog would be a great starting point to build a content publishing business, it is easy to update and low in cost. If you have built a website about your hobby, perhaps a Star Trek Fan website, you can simply give this old site a new look by using WordPress. This will help you build new content, setup your E-Mail list as well as help you find products to sell. Now you have built yourself a content publishing business that has authority and can start ranking organically quickly. A few examples of successful content publishing businesses are Wikipedia, TMZ and JohnChow.com. These are million dollar companies but a well run personal blog can easily provide a comfortable income to a person if it is done right. John Chow has created one of the best online education courses about how to create profit with your blog. If you are interested in creating a content publishing business you should check him out and download his free eBook after you are finished reading here. ;o) Professional Services Website: The website business model for professional services is a broad range of things. For example, a dentist, lawyer or Internet Marketing consultant would all setup a professional website to show their services to their targeted customers. Nowadays, most people would search on their phone or computer to find a service they would need. If I’m looking for a plumber, I would first do a search for a plumber in Vancouver, and then I see if they have a website or if they have been reviewed by clients and I will try to find out as much as I can about them. You don’t want to do business with people you can’t trust, right? This trend is clearly emerging for all professional services you can think of and the hunt for local search engine domination has just started. This business model is fairly simple as well, you could use the WordPress platform for this model as well since it would be useful to write a blog to keep in touch with your community and create relationships with your readers.
  • 12. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc My friends at OM4 have created one of the best professional services I know. They offer customized, managed professional websites on a special WordPress platform for a low monthly fee. I actually use them myself for hosting my website, takes the maintenance worries off my mind. eCommerce Store: The online store has been around for a long time but still is one of the biggest money makers on the Internet. There are so many examples of successful companies, but to name a few; Amazon, eBay and NexTag making billions and mostly from other people doing the work. Over the past few years, a trend has evolved where people build shopping cart sites rather than an actual store to safely utilize the start up cost. However, since the Internet is infinitive and with 7 billion people, there are a lot of needs to satisfy. This means that there is a space for you to build the next mega online store. Getting a successful online store running will take some time. One tip that you should always remember when building a shopping cart site is “Be unique, stay in touch and get reviews”. The biggest issue you are facing when building a website business is that you need to gain the trust of your customers and create awareness of your presence. If you are starting from nothing, do not expect to be rich by tomorrow. Building your first website business will be the hardest but stay with it and it will turn to gold. Education Services: In the coming years, this will be one of the biggest industries within the Internet. Nowadays, it is so simple if you have the spare $, you can build a community website and fill it with video and web content to start your own educational website. In a few years, our children will not go to school anymore, they will sit in front of their computers and learn from it. Think of it this way, with all the new possibilities of communicating with each other, the Internet makes it simple for a Guru to share their knowledge. For example, the University of Phoenix, does most of their courses online, saving millions in space and employment costs. With one Guru creating the material and being filmed when presenting the course, the same information is now indefinitely available to everybody signed up to the course. The tests can be made online and with the right programming, every test can be unique to the person being tested. With low administration support costs, this approach makes it much more affordable than having to pay teachers to stay around and answer questions. Also, within a few years, Watson the IBM supercomputer, could even replace the need of any human support people since it could answer questions like a human.
  • 13. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc Educational services are clearly on the rise judging from the sheer amount of such services being offered by Gurus in almost every niche. The great thing about the business model is there are an almost impossible to comprehend number of people waiting for you to share your knowledge. As an example, my friend Gyutae Park has created a really cool education community called WinnersCircle where he provides the members of the community with case studies to help them learn the best way on how to apply new marketing strategies. Software Development: The software development business model is simple: you have an idea for a web tool, you build it and then start selling access to it or make money from ads that are displayed inside of your application. Some of the most famous companies doing this kind of work would be Google, Facebook and Microsoft. If you have a great idea for something, the first thing you should do is check if somebody else already had this idea. In addition, outsourcing your development needs for your new application can save you thousands of dollars but can also lead you to frustration and a waste of your money. Developing a new system is nothing you should take lightly. I personally rate this as the most difficult business model where you would need the most start up capital, especially if you don’t know how to program. One of the biggest mistakes I see is when the owner changes his mind on something small 120 times a day and the programming team is trying to play catch up. One of the most important things is to create a plan, visualize your ideas and stick with the plan. In the next section, I will show you how to find the right business idea for yourself. I hope you have found this information useful so far. If you have any suggestions on this content please contact me so I can provide more information.
  • 14. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc FINDING THE RIGHT BUSINESS IDEA FOR YOURSELF Finding the right business idea for yourself is likely the most difficult task you will have. I think the best way to look at it is that the Internet is a near perfect image of the world around you. If you are passionate about something and can talk about it for hours at a time, there will be hundreds of other people who are also passionate about the same thing and thousands who are interested in it. So I guess what I’m saying is that you need to know yourself to know what the right business idea is for you. What can you be passionate about? What topic could you really devote and commit your time to? For most people they find that their hobby is the perfect website business idea for themselves. In addition, most people fail with their business not for lack of passion and interest but because they had a hard time committing to the difficult tasks involved. Often I recommend to Internet entrepreneurs to keep the day job he/she is in and start working in their free time on their own business. For example, starting a content publishing business about your hobby can be done with a very small investment of a few hundred dollars and a heavy commitment. For most people, the first two years will require a commitment, almost every day, of 3-4 working to start up their website business. If you can sustain yourself for the two years, more time commitment and hard work on your project will be the key. The Goal, you ask? It’s simple: to establish yourself as a “Guru” in your niche. By being passionate, knowledgeable and committed to your topic or niche you will have an easier time to reach this goal for yourself. I will explain more about the “Guru” status a little later in this eBook in the section “Become a Master my young Padawan”. However, until then, keep on reading, in the next section I will explain how you can research your business idea.
  • 15. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc RESEARCHING YOUR BUSINESS IDEA One of the most important things when you are starting a website business is the research into the market in order to clarify your idea. Reading industry publications, following industry leader’s peer blogs and social media can give you an idea on what is hot in the industry and what is not. It will also help you get a grasp of the language used in your industry. It is always recommended to stay in sync with terms other niche Gurus are using. The next phase of the operation would be to find the right niche or starting point for yourself. That sounds harder than it is; the great thing about us humans is that every person has a different point of view and a different way to project our thoughts to other people. One of the best tools to use to find out more about your market is the Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool. Simply type in your industry as a keyword, and you will get dozens of related keywords shown to you. The goal is to find the one or two main keywords as well as 5 category keywords that describe your website’s business at its core. Quality rather than quantity is the concept. From an SEO perspective it helps to dedicate one page on one topic rather than multiple ones. The main point of doing the research is to: • Find the right niche for yourself • Discover your audience • Who are the market leaders in this field? • How many links to their domain? • Have they been published? • Can you match their price point and create value? • Can you find a keyword matched domain name or come up with an good brand name yourself? • Your monetization route? One of the best Internet Marketers in the world, Jeremy Schoemaker, has recently released his ShoeMoney Tools 2.0 with some of the most powerful SEO and PPC tools of today. It's really some of the best advice you'll ever get. These tools can help you reduce the time you spend on research dramatically. Check them out, the trial offer is just $9.95. Sometimes investing in education or research tools can have immeasurable ROI to your business. Nevertheless, make sure you get your money's worth, not every single Internet Marketing book or education site is worth spending your money on.
  • 16. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc The ShoeMoney Tools have a much higher value than price and for most Marketers they will be essentials. The perfect website structure, also the perfect reversed Sales Funnel, more on this later in this eBook.
  • 17. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc PLAN YOUR STRATEGIES FROM THE START When you are starting a new website business, planning is of utmost importance. I found it most efficient to plan with set deadlines, In the launch phase, it helps you a lot to stay on track and in the day-to-day business it ensures that you complete the necessary tasks. Planning out your keyword strategy also helps; it is good if you have different topic ideas available to you if you feel burnt out and can’t come up with something. Writing a business plan also helps you ensure stability and provides a sort of “fallback” when you are doing business. Write a business plan for each of your website businesses to ensure long-term success. However, all that planning can also push you off your game when something goes wrong that you didn’t expect. After 12 years of working with Internet business, I can let you know a little secret, most of the time something unexpected happens. There is always something, like the server crashing right before you want to go online with a new project or there is a major bug found a few days before the new software should be released. So when planning out your idea, create goals and pointers for your overall strategy and be exact. Try to visualize your goal when you are planning designs, keywords and other things you will not do yourself. Communication is the key!
  • 18. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc HAVE GOALS & BUDGET FOR EACH WEBSITE BUSINESS YOU START It does not matter if you are starting one new website business or 200, you should always create goals and a budget plan for each of them. Treating your website business as a traditional business with a business plan, having accountability and a long-term strategy will help you stay on track with your business so you don’t give up the first time difficulties arise. When you are creating your goals and budget for the new business you are starting, try to stay realistic because it won't be easy. Therefore, when you have grasped a clear idea of your business concept, and have done the due diligence on research and its potential, you will find you can set your goals and budget more easily. For example, a goal could be reaching the first page of Google for your top 10 keywords within the first year or write 3 blog posts a week or even something like go to one local Industry meet up a month. Your budget is also very important: don’t plan from money you don’t have or future sales. In addition, something many unsuccessful website businesses seem to do is to spend most of their money on everything except the IT department where the core business success results from. Maintaining a website business costs approximately 5 times the work hours in a month than building it.
  • 19. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc OUTSOURCE SO YOU DON’T NEED TO CLONE YOURSELF Cloning of humans is illegal in most of the world, so don’t even think about it but if you do, let me know ;o) Some people may think outsourcing is bad that will result in not so good results. There is some truth to this but I will explain why outsourcing could work for you. Outsourcing is emerging as the new form of employment for most Internet professionals globally. These professionals offer services online, working from the comfort of their own home and on their own schedule. Benefits include savings on office space, insurance, health care, and other costs that can reduce the cost of the necessary labour you need to start and maintain your business. You can practically outsource everything in your business, rather than attempt to do everything yourself. Outsourcing is not more than hiring qualified individuals, though sometimes it happens that you will hire the wrong person like in any workplace. Educating and building a relationship with your employees is important. Communication and visualization is the key to successful outsourcing. I recommended staying away from outsourcing companies, they are often worse than slave owners, not all, but too many. John Reese made millions with Internet Marketing and other online products he published, and almost everything he does through outsourcing. He recently started a great online course focused on outsourcing. The name of the course is Outsource Force, and I urge you to check it out if you are planning to hire employees online. I personally outsource whenever I can see that it would cost me more time doing it myself. I have found putting a dollar value on my hour and charging myself for everything helps me stay on track with projects. Using Craigslist to find qualified help for your projects is ideal. The cost difference between hiring from North America or Europe to somebody from the Philippines or India is quite a bit, around 5 times in my experience for a similar level of technical education. So outsourcing programmers, designers, researchers, link builders and other professionals in the Philippines or India can cost you approximately as much as hiring one person locally. However, for specialized management level professionals, I choose to look for somebody from North America or Europe. Another tip is to consider hiring experts or very committed people you tend to meet as you progress through your business venture. Having a handful of specialists in- house managing your outsourced team can ensure shorter communication and quicker results.
  • 20. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc INTERNET MARKETING ESSENTIALS Finally, let’s talk about Internet Marketing. For many people it still seems mysterious and with all the different Gurus telling you the latest industry secrets, it often becomes quickly overwhelming. The secrets that are worthy of note are: Awareness, Trust and Profit. You need awareness of your business to drive traffic to your website; you need to be trustworthy so the visitors to your site convert and create profit. One of the biggest mistakes I see happening everyday is that businesses care only about the current sale rather than trying to create loyal customers. A loyal customer is a person who comes back to your business regularly and buys something else from you. Selling to customers who already bought from you is a lot easier than making the initial sale. That is very similar to the Mom & Pop store down the street. They only survived by being friendly and nice to the few customers they have, so they come back and feel good about it. In a similar vein, creating awareness for your website business initially required people to pay someone to get them links to their website since this is supposed to increase organic traffic. That is generally the correct thing to do, but most of the time, they get links from sites that are completely unrelated to their own business. When Mom & Pop started out, would it have made sense for them to drive to the next city 100 miles away and plaster the streets with posters for their store? No, it would not. It would make sense to go and talk to the stores in town and create a relationship with them. The store owners would then start recommending the Mom & Pop store to their own customers since they know Mom & Pop and trust them. Instead of going out and getting a million unrelated links to your site, you should be smart and just go for the few leaders in your industry and build a relationship with them. Do not be afraid to do something for them before you expect something in return. With leaders of your industry recommending you, giving you a link, you won't just gain trust with people who are interested in your industry, but you also create trust with search engines since you are receiving links from industry leaders related to your business. Thus, Internet marketing is actually more about being social and human then being technical and cruel. Every single good Internet Marketer will explain to you that brand awareness, trust and returning customers are paramount.
  • 21. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc E-MAIL LIST – CAPTURE THESE LEADS & CONVERT THEM Your email list will be the most important Internet marketing tool in your arsenal. It provides you with the possibility to convert leads into sales, create relationships with your customers and keep them informed about new products or services. By keeping your customers informed, providing great customer service and value will no doubt create continued growing income due to returning business. Happy returning customers are the best income source for any business, by enabling a consistent level of income monthly but also acting as invaluable promotional tools with word of mouth advertising. This is more effective than a costly print or television ad campaign. Building a good email list has been an important part of the Internet since the dawn of the Internet with the ARPANET. E-mail was one of the very first protocols in use and its function has not really changed much in the past 40 years. Don't fix what ain't broke, right? What has changed is the amount of people using the Internet, almost every person has at least two email addresses in use, one personal and one for work. Even with the rise of social networking, the amount of email communication has still increased. Unfortunately, email spam has also increased so much over the past few years that it really has become a huge issue for most email providers and email users. Spam is bad and Spammers are one of the worst kinds of people running around on the Internet. Becoming a spammer has also become much easier than a few years ago. All the large email providers have joined up to build a global blacklist of emails, IPs and domain names that having been marked once as spammer, all send out emails will be marked as spam immediately and will force negative results in the organic search engine rankings as well as PPC quality source. So being on the blacklist can destroy your business within a day. Protect your business by ensuring you avoid these activities: • Sending emails everyday or every hour to your email list, sometimes weekly is too much • Not using double opt-in and failing to let people unsubscribe • Sending emails from your home pc • Sending emails from your dedicated Server that is wrongly configured, allowing hackers to use your server as relay server or has a bad Subnet neighbourhood • Dedicated Server not being white listed • Sending out HTML emails with high Spam score • Sending out too many E-Mails. People react badly when they get emails they didn’t ask for. One of the best strategies I have found is actually very simple and easy to follow. Offer visitors signing up to double opt-in to your newsletter as a visible sign-up box in your side navigation, and when they make a comment. Integrating it to get sign ups per RSS subscription, Facebook friends and Twitter Followers to your email list.
  • 22. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc Most importantly, ask all visitors who convert into customers to join your list to keep them informed. As soon as they have signed up, send a thank you email via Autoresponder to the new subscriber and offer them something free with value to them to show your appreciation of them signing up. Now you start building a relationship with your subscribers, like in the Mom & Pop business from the earlier example, and by providing value to your customers, it can make a significant boost to your website business. Building a relationship with your customers is not bombarding them with useless emails nor calling them unexpectedly to tell them about your newest great product. If you have ever picked up a book about sales or management I am sure you have read about building trust first. Being polite, helpful and asking them before telling them what they want will help you in building a long-term relationship with your customers. A great tool for your email list strategy is to use a Web based email marketing software like Aweber. They ensure that your newsletters are delivered, taking care of the subscribes and unsubscribes automatically. It has an industry leading Autoresponder system , allowing you to integrate with every web platform easily, as well as RSS subscription and PayPal and over 135 free and easy to modify HTML E- Mail Templates. Test-drive them for just $1 for the first month.
  • 23. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc SEO – GET TRAFFIC ORGANICALLY SEO or Search Engine Optimization is what will bring most of your traffic. Search engines are and will be what most Internet users will use to find the right information, services or products that they are looking for. As I explained in the Research your Business Idea section, knowing and focusing on the right keywords that are related to your business is fundamental to your website business. The most important on-page attributes for SEO is: • Page Title – that should be an eye-catching sentence of around 60 characters • Meta Description – Short description of the page’s relevancy to targeted terms to attracted visitors with around 160 characters • URL – using the target keyword in your url • H1 or H2 tag – these are attention attributes for search engines • Being relevant to the topic, useful, helpful and of value to the visitor. Create short pages for each topic rather than one long page about multiple topics There are many more SEO attributes that can have a positive or negative effect on your ranking but the above ones are the most important and in many ways, the safest ones to use. Localization: To date, one of the most important ranking factors is site speed and localization. This will become even more important in the near future. This is because our population is always growing, and studies have shown that most Internet users, 86% tend to search for things they can actually do locally. That is one of the reasons why social networking has become so extremely popular all over the world. You can now search with your iPhone or Android to find a store near you and check their inventory before you even step into the store and start searching for it. One way to use this to your advantage is to have your website hosted in your area to reduce the connection time for your visitors. Also, spending money on decent hosting that does not go offline every few days is very beneficial in the end for your business. Use localized keywords in your website if possible; relevance is the key to great search engine ranking. What works for humans normally works for search engines as well.
  • 24. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc Site structure & duplicate content: Duplicate content is the downfall of most websites. The larger they grow, the more the content gets duplicated, not just by other websites but more often on the website itself. When the flow of new content stops the ranking will slowly go away since the site structure distributes the page rank to only the important pages and then gets lost to the duplications. The reason for this is often that there is no real site structure followed on the long run. One structure that has been in place since the start of the Internet is the folder pyramid site structure. Each of your biggest traffic keywords becomes it’s own category / folder with subfolders and product / high converting pages in each of them. With the rise of dynamic websites, this often has been ignored by developers but the best practice is to give each of your pages a unique URL. For example, you are a dentist in Vancouver so you would want your site structure to look like this so that it will still be valid in two decades: Www.KerryTheDentist.ca – your home page Www.KerryTheDentist.ca/teeth-whitening/ - one of the categories Www.KerryTheDentist.ca/teeth-whitening/laser/ - a subcat Www.KerryTheDentist.ca/teeth-whitening/laser/dentist-white-teeth-with-laser-whitening.hml - the article you published about this topic. Duplicated content can be created with simple mistakes like forgetting to 301 redirect the second domain name or the non-www to your actual domain. Try to avoid these pitfalls. Link Building: Link building is considered one of the most contentious issues in the SEO community. Links are important for your website business. They are like highway ads leading a customer to your outlet, or the befriended business from Mom & Pop. A link is like a recommendation of somebody so it should be treated with much value. Over the past years, search engines have demonstrated a trend towards looking at the where is the link coming from. Is it related to what you are doing? Is the content around the link positive or negative? Do you link to the owner of this website in some way? Have you bought the link or is it natural? Does the link have any editorial value? There are many ways to build strong links. For example, there are directory submissions, or RSS for your blog. You can create articles, video or audio content and publish it on other websites like Wiki, Squeeze, Hubpages or personal blogs which have a related topic. However, the best links come from happy customers who want to share their experience about you with the world, those are the links you want. Always try to build deep links to your product pages rather than just to your homepage and your few target pages.
  • 25. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc SALES FUNNEL – CONTENT IS PRIZED AND CONVERSION IS KING Fresh content is very important. Adding fresh content creates links to your site, gives your visitors a reason to return and allows you to build your brand as well as awareness for your business. However, even the best content does not help much if it does not convert. When you create content for your website, it helps to keep the Sales Funnel in mind as it works very well with the pyramid site. As you can see, the Pyramid site structure already creates somewhat of a sales funnel. Generally, visitors don’t become customers of your business the first time they find your homepage. It won’t happen until you have cultivated enough trust in your business to make a purchase. So building your sales funnel with content that converts is very important. Don’t be afraid to ask for help from friends and customers when you encounter issues selling your products. Always ask how you can improve their experience. You cannot fail as long you are trying; you only fail when you stop. Being honest and maybe sometimes being personal can help customers connect with you. When using Google Analytics, you can see how traffic flows into your business. For example, your homepage has probably the most amount of traffic out of all your webpages but may have the lowest conversion rate. The deeper you dig into your site, you might notice that you only have a handful of people visiting the page but 2 – 3 of them actually convert.
  • 26. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc Secret tip: The power of deep pages: http://www.bgtheory.com/blog/are-search-queries-becoming-even-more-unique-statistics-from-google/ Over 20% of Googles Broad search queries each day are new or haven’t been done in the past 6 month. 70% of the Broad queries have no exact-matched keywords and over 50% of user queries are greater then three words. Since it is almost impossible to rank for a Broad keyword, which would be when your pages show up every time somebody types-in a Keyword phrase combined with unique words it has become best practise to target exact keywords. But you can only find approximately 30% of the exact-matched keywords in your Keyword research tools. This means that it is important that your Product / Services / Content pages are indexed and have page rank to support the pages above. Instead of building links just to your Homepage or Category pages you should focus at least 75% on building links to your deep pages so that you can use internal linking to reach higher ranking for your top keywords. Sure, it is harder to do it this way but in the future, this will help you prevail when other fails. My friend Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com has created the best SEO/SEM Training and Community I know of, the information in the member’s only area is priceless. Here I learned how to connected the dots of Internet Marketing and I still see him as the greatest Mentor I ever had.
  • 27. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc PPC – PAY FOR TRAFFIC THAT CONVERTS PPC or Pay Per Click is the most common form of Internet marketing and growing exponentially every year. Every major search engine and most larger websites offer their own PPC system like Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter or Facebook. PPC can be used to drive highly converting traffic to your business and sometimes can make enough conversions to ensure a stable cash flow. I also know of businesses that are completely based on their lead creation on paid traffic. However, PPC can quickly be detrimental to your advertising budget without creating results if not done correctly. Geotargeted Ads: One of the most useful ways of targeting the right traffic with PPC is the use of Geo Ads. Geo targeted ads are ads you make directly for one region like New York or Vancouver. Using the same example of the Vancouver dentist, you would not want to pay for any ads that are displayed anywhere else than in Vancouver, BC, Canada since a person in New York would most likely not have much interest to come and visit your business. Or let’s say you are a shopping cart business and you prefer customers from the USA at the moment since it would cost more and take longer to send your products to let’s say the UK. You would select then the United States as your Geo target zone in your PPC Tool. Ensure that your ads are running in the right Geotargeted location so you don’t waste money on nonsense traffic or leads. Quality Score: Over the past few years, a new factor has started to become more important for PPC advertisers and that is the quality score. With a low quality score, you can quickly end up paying multiple times the amount of other advertisers with high quality Score. The quality score is combined from how related your keywords are to your landing page, how well optimized your page is for search engines, any malware on your site, do you spam with emails or other communication avenues, amongst other factors. In simple terms, search engines are trying to take a more human approach to paid advertising as well as indirectly forcing you to provide quality and usefulness to their customers to reduce spam and fraud. PPC in Video Marketing: One of the largest growing mediums on the internet are videos. PPC can be used to display ads in videos or video clips before or during videos. This will quickly become the replacement for TV ads. Start using PPC in your videos now so you have an advantage against your competitors.
  • 28. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc PPC has gained much complexity in recent years and should not be taken lightly. It reigns as the most powerful marketing tool to drive instant traffic to any website. It is also being used to optimize your long-term SEO strategy right from the beginning. PPCBlog.com offers great free advice as well as a paid training lesson community where you can learn all the knowledge you need to run successful PPC campaigns on any platform. You should check it out.
  • 29. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc SOCIAL MARKETING – CONNECT AND BE SOCIAL Social Marketing has become a heavyweight in connecting with potential & current customers of your business. Many believed that this started recently with the rise of Web 2.0 but in reality, it has been around for almost as long as the Internet. Names were different back then. You used message boards / forums rather than Facebook, or Chats / IRC rather than Twitter but for the longest time people have used the Internet to socially connect with each other to share information, knowledge or services. I made my very first internet sales over a forum about dedicated servers. When I registered my account there I just got my first dedicated server and tried to set it up myself but had too little knowledge regarding Linux server at that point. I ran into some snags and needed to ask for some help. Instead of just asking every time I had an issue, I only posted when I could not find a solution on my own. Often I came across other people who had similar problems and whenever I found a solution I posted it as answers for the people with the same issue. Within a few weeks, starting as pretty much a complete Noob on Dedicated Server, I created a reputation within the German game hosting community for being an expert on Dedicated Server and Game Server Configurations. The reason I just shared this with you is that the same principle can be used by any one, in any niche and at any time. The social aspect of the Internet can be the deciding factor in how quickly you can accomplish your goals. People are generally lazy, we don’t want to do more then we absolutely need too. Helping people who have an issue can create long lasting friendships or business partnerships simply for the reason that you have helped somebody. By answer questions or providing help to others can help establish yourself quickly as an expert in your niche. Being viewed as an expert is normally the result that other people take you more serious and are more inclined to buy something from you or start a business relationship with you. Being social on the Internet: For many it is much easier to overcome the natural shyness when connecting with other over the Internet, after you meet somebody on the internet it is often much easier to meet with them in person since a baseline relationship has already has been established. The one thing to remember for a truly effective social marketing campaign is that it is all about being social. This means that it is not about you, your product or services but rather, it is about other, society and all the people around you.
  • 30. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc PUBLIC RELATIONS – HELP OTHERS GET BIG BY HELPING BACK Using public relations practices can have a much bigger effect on your business than almost any other traditional marketing method. Google built most of their business on public relations rather than spending huge dollars on advertisement budgets. Methods you should implement include press releases related to company activities. Sending out PR for your yearly summer sale will most likely not get you much attention in the media but perhaps something that will garner you attention is a notice sent out about your company’s donation, to a good cause, of 50% of all revenue from your yearly summer sale. Consider granting exclusive interviews or behind the scenes views to journalists that have built a previous relationship with you and your company. This can result in media attention. Do not give it all away but give enough so people are interested in it. The trick here is not to go after mainstream media directly but rather connect with leaders in your industry and give them the exclusive. Mainstream will then jump on the bandwagon and report about it if the topic has created enough interest. Mainstream media has been forced to keep up with social media which means that if there is good reception in the social media arena, it will likely cross over to print, TV or radio. You can also do very well with indirect public relations by not demonstrating direct influence on the media. One of the easiest ways of doing indirect Public Relations is supporting non-profit organizations, local causes, research, aid relief efforts or schools as well as youth teams and organizations. Most of these kinds of organizations are only able to survive if they can rally enough people for their cause, and they are very happy to tell everybody who supports them. Let me try to give you a real life example: Using our dentist in Vancouver example, instead of spending lots of money on some flyers that end up in the garbage anyway, he could create a yearly contest for the schools in his area with a prize where one child per year can win braces for free. Only thing they need to do is to go to the squeeze page and fill their name, email, school and upload a picture of their teeth. Many parents will be interested in something like this to save a few dollars but the real idea behind it is that at the end of the contest you send out an email blast announcing the winner but still give everybody else a great offer that will be hard to resist. Try offers like get free teeth cleaning with every yearly check-up or free braces assessment with each check-up. With this, you will be able to support your local community as well as maybe help out a few kids who are not as well off as others but the end result will be the same: more customers and trust is created. If you think in terms of how to help within your means, it will be the best PR you could hope for and often doesn’t cost you as much as traditional advertising types.
  • 31. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc SETUP ALL ESSENTIALS AND START YOUR WEBSITE BUSINESS Each website business has essentials that you need that are important to run your business as well as making your life a lot easier. These should be setup before you really launch your website business. I refer to this as the Beta stage of your business. This can be used to determine if you are on the right track with your business as well as to ensure that when you start the real work with your business then things will run smoother. To be blunt with you, nothing will help you more with this than experience. The more businesses that you launch you will find things will get easier and more routine without so much drama. There is no fact that has remained more timeless then “Shit happens, fix it, communicate to others”. If you expect that things will always go as planned you will work yourself up about nothing, yes there are times where things go downhill faster than you can say shit, but in reality keeping a cool head and focusing on what is next to solve the issue has often resulted in the best results. Research: Before you start your website business, do all possible research on your business idea, competitors, the market or niche as well as keywords. Design: Pay for a custom design for your site where you own the psd and it can’t be reproduced. Use your competition research to establish standardized design elements, colors and icons. Get corporate designs such as logos / templates from the same source in order to create continuity. 99designs.com is a great place to get designs for your website business. Domain & Hosting: I generally recommended that your hosting is separate from your domain account. In the event something happens with your host provider then you are still in control of your domains and you can easily point them to another host. In addition, it is generally a good idea to go with larger domain providers than smaller ones for better security reasons. Get an account and purchase your domains with a company like GoDaddy.com because they have a great price point. With hosting I would recommend to looking for a reasonable local hosting offer that includes server hosted in a good data center in your area. You will be amazed what you can get from a small hosting company, I actually prefer them. Web platform: In reality, for 90% of all business, there is an easy to customize solution that can be used which is already in existence. More often than you expect there will be an OpenSource system that will cover most of your needs. Sometimes Sometimes a
  • 32. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc custom development, or at least a partial custom development, will be needed. This really depends on what your needs are. I really like the Wordpress platform and for most cases, it offers all the plugins that are needed to build any kind of website business. For larger ecommerce sites, or other web applications, I think custom is more often the way to go. Since you still end up with large customization efforts even with opensource products like Magento that are offering extensive functionality. Email accounts and newsletter: It looks a lot better when you have you@yourdomain.com as your Email address, you can either add your business Email to your Gmail or Live account by using Email forward from your hosting company or domain account. I personally have Google Apps accounts, where I can just add any domain/business whenever I want. It keeps things separate but still in the same place. Also, get an Aweber account and setup your email list and newsletter system right from the start. Accounts and money: Okay, I’m not a financial advisor by any means, however keeping your business and private life separate can help immensely with your success. Having a separate account for each business to keep control and track of everything is helpful and keeps things honest. Treat yourself like an employee, pay yourself a wage and change it only once a year. Having an accounting professional doing your books can help as well, you will be surprised how easy it is to find a local person to do it for you for a reasonable price, just put an ad on Craigslist. Setting up all your accounts: There are hundreds of large websites that want you to have an account with them like Google, Yahoo and Facebook. These accounts hold some great value and should be registered as soon as you have found your business name. This will take time and effort to do but the payoff is great. Most of these sites allow you at least one back link, as well as allowing you to connect to your Facebook, Twitter accounts and your RSS feed from your website for updates. Occasionally, these sites are also great for picking up a few new clients. If you have subscribed to my newsletter you will receive my free must-have Internet Accounts Checklist in the next few days. Directory Submission: There are still a few Internet directories with value that could help your business succeed. For example DOMZ, Yahoo Directory, BotW and business.com are paid directories that have a large ROI and long-term value. Also, local directories can be very useful for your website.
  • 33. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc You should now be close to setting up and moving forward with starting your website business. Have you asked your friends to test your site, newsletter and all the other things for you? It’s time to start the launch process.
  • 34. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc GET READY TO LAUNCH IN 10, 9, 8 … There are many types of launches on the internet and they are used in almost every niche. Launching your products, services or whatever you can think of is a simple way to create attention to your new product as well as expanding your network of internet friends who help you with your website business. Sure, like with everything on the Internet you should not over do it, changing the layout of your website every month and relaunching it will quickly lead to people being annoyed with you. Most likely you are wondering right now why I am talking about the launch process after I recommended bringing your site online? I expect that you are at the start or middle of your website business at the moment. If you haven’t already built yourself a network of people, who are likely to support what you are planning to launch, there would not be much sense in launching. Here is a helpful launch checklist: 1. Research what your customers and niche needs 2. Produce what you found is missing 3. Talk to your network of friends who are interested in your niche and ask for help with launching your product; in return you would let them try it for free or with a large discount. 4. Talk to leaders / Gurus in your Industry and ask them if they have the same issue and that you have built a solution for it and you would be happy to be in a joint venture with them. For example, using an affiliate program so they get 10%, 20% or even 75% of the sale in every sale they produce is a simple way of sharing. 5. You will then provide the commercial material for it to all your JV partners, like email templates, squeeze pages, videos, articles and so on. 6. Set a date for the launch start and the actual release and inform your partners and network about it including any changes. 7. Schedule your pre-launch procedure and sync it with your Partners, this should not be longer than one week from the first blast going out until release date to ensure that the anticipation you are creating is not gone when your actual release date comes. 8. On release date, expect a 48-hour day to deal with all the little issues that will come out right at the wrong time. 9. Follow up with your customers and interested people in your newly extended network to survey their needs and how you can improve or help. 10. Start with the preparation for next year’s launch. Doing a product launch is one of the most useful marketing strategies, and it does not matter what media you are using to get your point across. I’m sure you remember the iPad launch just a couple a months ago or how car makers been doing it for years. People love product launches, and this will not change any time soon. It’s also hard for me to say no to the excitement of owning something that nobody else has yet. Learning about product launches and how they work as well as doing some on your own to get experience will help to make all future launches better.
  • 35. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc Jeff Walker, a great Internet Marketer, built a training program that deals with how to launch your products. This program is called Product Launch Formula. It is a great resource that can increase your business, so dramatically, within a few weeks that you will wonder “how did I ever live without product launches.”
  • 36. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc NOW THE REAL WORK STARTS At this stage, the daily grind will start. If you stop working on improving your website your business will disappear as fast as it appeared. Motivating yourself, especially if you are handling most tasks at home alone, can be extremely frustrating and depressing. You will often feel that nothing is going right and everything seems to be an uphill battle. Even successful website business owners face the same problem only there are more people involved. Be careful not to face burnout and don’t try to do everything alone all at once. The 80 – 20 Rule: We humans are something special and most of us can’t even imagine how much potential is in each of us. The 80 – 20 rule is defined as 80% the world’s income is produced by 20% of the world’s population or in other terms 80% of the work you get done in a day you can get done in 20% of your working time. If you managed to focus 20% of your daily time, let’s say 4-5 hours on improving your website, then your business will improve dramatically. Soon you will hire or outsource to others, to do the things you don’t want to do. Only work 20% of the day to run and improve your business and spend the rest of the day on the beach, drinking bloodwine then you will get more done while being more effective. Focus on your strengths and give the remaining tasks to others: One thing all successful entrepreneurs have done since the beginning of time is to outsource work they can’t do or they are not good at. You can’t learn all the skills needed to run a larger successful business completely on your own. You will end up with trying rather than getting things done. This will frustrate you since it feels like you are not getting closer to your goals. It is very important to understand how your business works and to have an overview of what is going on at any given time, without it you could end up losing money. By hiring people to do a specific job like create a design package for you or setup a WordPress, you can expedite your goals and focus on gettin’ ‘er done. When I do client work, I always outsource things like design, content and programming to other people who are specialized in these fields. It reduces my workload since I would rather manage projects than doing the lag work but the greatest advantage is that I am much more productive. The day-to-day work will be where the real work needs to continue: create links, publish new content, send out email blasts at regular intervals to stay in contact with your customers as well as to ensure. To do it all on your own you would need to work for five people, which will burn you out. So try to outsource one part of your business at a time to one person who is specialized in this particular skill. For
  • 37. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc example, if you found a great programmer and you have an easy time working with him you should ask him for an Annual Maintenance Contract which is around 40% of the initial programming cost so he does updates and little changes on the site when needed. Accounting - if this is not your thing why would you want to spend hours with it? Sure, you may save a few dollars in the short term but how much does your hour cost? Remember earlier when I said you should treat yourself like an employee right from the beginning? Could you not use your time better with improving your business? Like writing articles or building links or ensuring that all your processes work correctly. When the real work starts, stay on course, think about the long-term and focus on what is important that you can do it yourself easily and outsource everything else so you do not burn out.
  • 38. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc BECOME A MASTER, MY YOUNG PADAWAN After you dedicated your life to something, created and carried passion for an industry, you will have gained knowledge as well as a respectable viewpoint of things. You have become a Master of your domain. In the olden days, it often took 30 years an Apprentice to became a Master, which often stays true even today. When school is over, there should not be a day where you do not learn something new. After learning about one industry and mastering different elements of it, you can become a Master or Guru. As I said before, taking one niche/topic in one industry at a time will ensure success. There is nobody who will teach you everything, only experience does. However, when you have succeeded in mastering your topic as well as you are able to show that you have produced quality work, there is no reason why you would not want to showcase it. The most important part of the Guru status is to teach others what you have learned. Do you think Luke would have been sent to find Master Yoda in Star Wars V - The Empire Strikes back if Master Yoda would have never thought anybody before? Simply no, there would have been nobody who would have known about Yoda, nor to tell his tales. Sorry for my Nerdienizum, but the point of it is that the legend of a person’s roots is in his / her followers, believers, students or Facebook friends. Sharing is caring if you want to build a Guru status for yourself. You need to share your knowledge with others and try to teach it to some. The Internet has given any person the possibility to publish himself, whether with an eBook or blog, the possibility is yours. However, after reaching your Guru status, you need to keep on going; sure, 15 minutes of fame can change your life but ensuring a long-term successful business even beyond your life can be more satisfying. Take on your own apprentices: When you are a Master and run a successful business, there no reason why you should not find yourself a young, passionate individual who would enjoy learning the trade from you. Taking on apprentices can help to create a legend that will carry on long after your body has turned to dust. If you can build a great working relationship with your apprentices, they will be grateful for your guidance. Even after they have left your safe arms, separation and change is a normal part of life and should be expected. Sure, it takes energy, money and time to teach another person about your trade but if they go on to another city and do a fabulous job people will ask where they have learned their skills and your apprentice will humbly answer and build your reputation far beyond your own possibilities. Building your legend by teaching others can ensure wealth forever. Become a Master, my Padawan.
  • 39. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc SUMMING THIS UP Whether you are starting a website business or already running one, you should never forget what is working and never lose sight of what is coming. Your passion combined with knowledge and your time can create a website business that will secure you a monthly income that nobody can take away from you. That is exactly what it will take you to build awareness as well as trust to create a successful website business. There are neither short cuts nor quick solutions that will guarantee your success. There is only YOU, who can make your dream come true, only you who can find the right people to make things happe, only you to learn and to GET ‘ER DONE. Nobody who had success on the Internet had it easy. Most successful Internet entrepreneurs have spent countless hours working on new ways to create awareness, trying out different designs or products and services that their customers would like. Even if they reach fame and wealth, they often still spend more time building their business than the average internet user. If things don’t go your way, why not try a different approach? When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb he said that he needed over 10,000 tries to get it right, but he never failed.
  • 40. http://www.facebook.com/falko.luedtke http://twitter.com/FalkoInc http://ca.linkedin.com/in/falkoinc THANK YOU First, I wanted to thank you dear reader. I hope you enjoyed reading this book as much as I had writing it and hope I may have taught you one or two new things you didn’t know about before. I want to thank my Mother, Cordula, for all the help, motivation, energy and ass kicks she has given me in my life. I could not imagine a day without your wisdom and understanding. Thank you for being there for me whenever I needed it. Thank you, Roselyn for fighting your way through my horrible dyslexic writing to make it readable for others. I know you are a big reason why my English is where it is now and I will never forget this. Aaron Wall, for your amazing information you give away, all the questions you answered and for all the support you have given me to launch myself into the SEM market, thank you so much! Chadwick Conte, for all the help and the great working partnership we have created over the past years. Your input is very important to me. IBM, which taught me so much about IT and business that I could have never learned anywhere else. It is truly one of the most amazing companies in the world. As well as the only one I would join! Thank you all for being there for me!