Here are a few tips to help you get through this recession…

1)Cut back on advertising spending- You won’t usually hear me recommend advertising cutbacks, but this can really help save you some money in the short term. Keep any saved money in your advertising budget for when the economy turns around, and there are buyers ready to spend money. Don’t use your advertising money elsewhere unless you have no other choice. I recommend holding back advertising dollars to spend when consumers are ready to buy.

2)Reduce any website maintenance charges- If you are paying a firm to make updates and maintain on your site, see if they can reduce your monthly fees for less service in return. Now is a good time to see about reducing any monthly charges that may go unused. I recommend really streamlining your books and seeing where any money is being spent for little in return.

3)Offer Special Deals- No matter how bad the economy may be, there are still buyers out there. You may need to search harder to find them, or just offer a deal they cannot resist. Try coupons, free shipping, or throw in some extra products for them. By making this customer happy you are now able to convert a sale into a long lasting customer. Also, people who get a smoking deal are more likely to tell their friends and family.

4)Plan for the future- Now is a great time to plan for the future. You probably have a little more free time now then you did back when business was booming. Take any downtime you have to create a plan for when sales pick back up again. Maybe not is the time to plan a site redesign. You will be a step ahead of your competition if you already have a “after recession” plan ready to go. Make sure your books, inventory, staff is standing by for when this recession is coming to an end. Don’t cut resources until you cant afford to pay them anymore. Just remember, things will get back to normal after this recession runs it course.

5) Try to Gain Free Publicity and Brand Recognition- Use the free resources out there to try and gain brand recognition, even if they don’t generate immediate sales. Sites such as Craigslist and Backpage are free, and can help drive brand recognition. Post on these sites regularly. Also try to get listed on as many directories as possible. Also reach out to possible business partners to share links. Slow times can be great times to help build your SEO strategy. The work you put in now will pay off big time when the recession is over and money is ready to be spent.

Try some of these tips and the recession will be over before you know it. Good Luck!

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We submitted payment for two links last weekend on The Social Millionaire (www.thesocialmillionaire.com) and still have not gotten directions on how to submit our links. I know that each link is only $1 but hey, we were doing the guy a favor and we’re trying to help him out on his journey to $1 million.

The funds have cleared our PayPal account and it’s showing fully paid to Hankinson Enterprises. If you check our their website, does this seem like something you can trust? I’d say NO! Click here for screen shot of payment to Hankinson Enterprises and Pat Hankinson. Funds cleared on March 15, 2008 and it’s now March 21, 2008 and haven’t heard a thing.

We have also sent two emails through his contact form regarding our payment and how we can submit our links on The Social Millionaire website and once again, no response! Either the form isn’t working properly and he’s not getting the emails or Pat Hankinson is just ignoring our emails.

Initially I was rooting for this guy but now I’m calling it a quick way to make a buck and ultimately a SCAM! Please let me know if I am wrong. If you are one of the lucky ones who got a link on the site, are you even getting any traffic? I don’t see a blob of words driving much targeted traffic.

Hey Pat Hankinson, where the hell are our links? Anyway, I guess that’s it.

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We all know that Google owns the world of online search and we all know that we must do what they want in order to keep on good terms with them. One Google slap can set your website and business back a few notches so you need to do what you can in order to not get slapped with penalties.

In the past few years, there have been so many illegitimate websites and blogs that have been set up with the sole intention of making a dime online. Most of these are either made for Adsense websites or affiliate websites crammed with nothing other than banners, affiliate links and other methods of advertising to make a quick dime.

With all of these types of websites that have been popping up over the past few years, it’s starting to cram the search engines, especially Google since they are the big dog! Owners are doing whatever they can to drive people to these sites in hopes they will get someone to click on an advertisement and they will make a few bucks. Owners are primarily doing this through black hat SEO (illegal search engine optimization) and pay per click advertising on Google Adwords. This is making it so much harder for legitimate companies to compete online because they have to deal with all of the garbage websites that are cramming up the online world.

In an attempt to cure some of this online spammy mess, Google rates websites on something they call quality score. Quality score will be utilized to the maximum moving forward to try and eliminate these made for Adsense and affiliate sites. It’s no longer the day where someone can create a web page, throw up some advertisements and allow people to click away. Webmasters and site owners are now going to have to develop their websites with quality score in mind. You might be asking now, what is quality score exactly? Quality score is a metric Google uses to measure how relevant a web page or website is in regards to the keywords they are using to advertise the website in paid search such as Google Adwords. So, you can assume that you would get a low quality score if you have a web page or landing page about making money online but you are trying to drive people to your landing page with the keywords computer resources. These really don’t go hand in hand. In order to receive a higher quality score by Google, you will need to have your web page or landing page content reflect your keywords. So, if you have a web page about making money online, you ideal content for that page should be something about how to make money online by selling XYZ and you should try to drive traffic with the keywords, make money online or how to make a living online, or learn to make money online. These keyword phrases directly related to the landing page content and Google will reward you for this. Google also rewards you with a higher quality score for uniqueness. Provide unique and valuable content and they will raise your quality score.

So, you are now asking, why do I need a high quality score? You need a great quality score because a high quality score will allow you to pay less for Pay Per Click advertising while allowing you to rank higher in the results. If you are familiar with PPC advertising, you know that it’s basically a bidding system where you bid on keywords and in return people do searches on Google for these keywords you bid on and you rank depending on your bid and quality score. Web pages and landing pages with a low quality score will have to pay higher bid prices in order to show up in the results. The more relevant your landing page is to your Google Adwords keywords and ad copy, the less you will pay for each bid or click and the higher Google will rank you in the paid results. This is Google’s way of rewarding your web page or landing page for being relevant. So, in reality, you might bid less than one of your competitors and you might rank higher. Why? Because you have a better quality score than they do. It’s simple, create a quality web page or landing page and use relevant keywords and ad copy when you are driving traffic to it from Google Adwords and you will be safe. Throw up a crappy web page or landing page with keywords and ad copy that’s not relevant and you will be penalized and you will not rank so well. You also run the chance of being banned. You’re better off doing it the right way, the first time around. It will pay off in the end when you are sitting pretty in the top of the results and paying a low cost per click and your competitors are paying an arm and a leg to even rank on the same page.

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You don’t often see a major Fortune 500 corporate website with dark colors such as black, gray and red taking up the entire screen, do you? You usually see a clean color palette with whites, blues and grays that are pleasing to the eye and the target audience. On the other hand, if you are creating a rock band website, dark colors might be the perfect match. It all depends on your target audience. Businesses and individuals should choose colors and color schemes for their websites keeping in mind they will have to please the visitors eye first and foremost. If the visitor isn’t happy with the visuals of a website, they will leave and find a website that is visually appealing to them.

Here is a list of free websites and tools that will help you find and pick the right colors for your website. Take your time with this as you want to make a lasting impression with your website.

www.colorschemer.com

www.wellstyled.com

www.colourlovers.com

www.websitetips.com

www.website-colors.com

www.siteprocentral.com

www.digitdesigns.com

www.pagetutor.com

www.colorpicker.com

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With this said, we will now discuss the different pieces of search engine optimization that will help you dominate the search engines in your market.

Pick A Keyword Rich Domain Name

This sounds simple enough but people like to make this harder that it is. Ideally, you want your domain name (www.yourdomainnamehere.com) to be keyword rich and relate to the theme of your business and website. Having a keyword rich domain will give you a head start on your competition. So, let’s say that you have a website about blue widgets. It would be a good idea to somehow integrate these keywords into your domain. Which domain name do you think would have a better chance at showing up in the search engines: www.bluewidgetsaregreat.com or www.widgitery.com? If you picked the first domain, you are correct! The domain that has keywords will likey rank higher that a non-keyword rich domain simply because it contains keywords that relate to your website.

There are many tools that can help you pick a great keyword rich domain but the best way to do this is pick your primary keywords for your website. Then go to a site such as GoDaddy.com and just start searching for that perfect domain. It will tell you if it’s available. Write down your favorite 5 domains or so and then ask a few friends which ones they prefer. Don’t tell strangers which domains you like as the domain market is highly competitive and people will buy them up before you know it. So, only tell people you trust. Once you get some user feedback, buy the domain and various extensions such as .org, and .net and .mobi if you are planning on creating a mobile website as well. After you secure your domain name, the fun begins. You get to start building your website with search engine optimization in mind.

This part is considered on-page search engine optimization. Our next post in the Guide To Search Engine Domination will talk about how you should build your website with SEO in mind. This is where we dig in a bit deeper and start to execute SEO strategies on our site.

Stay tuned…

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1)How many visitors per day are you hoping to drive to your site?

2)How many visitors does it take to start to see conversions take place?

3)How much money spent is too much to turn a positive ROI?

4)Is there a cap amount where anything over is not productive to your site?

5)How competitive is my market for the main keywords?

6)How much time/energy am I willing to spend setting up and editing these campaigns?

The answer to these questions will be different for every site. When we ask some of our clients these questions, we sometimes get blank stares in return. That is why it may make sense to start with a small budget and work your way to a larger budget, when you see great leads coming in. Some sites can see success with just about $20 dollars a day, while others need at least $500 a day to get a single conversion. Depending on how much money a single conversion earns you, this will help you decide if your advertising budget makes sense. There is a sweet spot for every advertiser that you need to find. This sweet spot is the range where your advertising budget turns a positive ROI. To find that sweet spot, don’t be scared to ask ppc professionals for help.

In contrast, some people advertise their site online hoping to raise awareness of their topic, but not looking to make money from conversions or sales. If you are not making “sales”, you need to ask yourself how much money per day you are willing to spend to generate awareness for your site. Generally these types of sites have smaller budgets, but are also paying less per click.

When trying to create a pay per click budget you need to understand that while the costs seems high, it is usually right on line with any sort of newspaper,radio, magazine ad you might place (per year). The great thing about spending on the Internet, over those types of print and audio ads, is that you know people are landing on your site. That is why ad agencies are placing more of their clients money into online advertising, than print/radio ads. If you are looking to generate sales, please do not be scared to place most of your overall advertising budget into a paid ad campaign. This is a new way of thinking that is scary to some site owners, but this is the way advertising is heading.

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Plan Your Search Engine Strategy Before You Develop Your Website

Before you even think about building a website, you need to first think about how you will drive traffic to the website. People don’t just magically find your website through cyberspace. You need to put yourself out there and you need to do it better that your competition or you will just get buried with the 99% of other companies trying to do the same thing as you. You have to behard-nosed, persistent, risky and know when to make a move. If you sit back and wait, you will not survive.

One of the best and cheapest ways to drive traffic to your website is search engine optimization. Search engine optimization, according to Wikipedia is, the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Now you are saying, what they heck does this mean! Basically search engine optimization drives traffic to your website via search engines such as Google, MSN and Ask. This website traffic is called organic or natural. This is done by optimization.

In order for your website to draw search engine traffic, it must be properly optimized for the search engines. There are many ways to optimize your site and we will be going over all of these in this SEO series over the next week or so.

But before we dig deeper into search engine optimization, we need to first do some analysis. We need to figure out what we need to optimize in order to drive traffic to our website. We need to figure out our business goals. We need to figure out our primary business keywords and key phrases. Keywords and key phrases are what people type into the search engines such as Google to find your website. Let’s say your website is about brown dogs. Obviously you would like people to find your website about brown dogs through the search engines because it is free or organic website traffic. In order to do this, we need to optimize the website for your primary term, brown dogs. Optimizing your website for brown dogs will increase the likelihood that someone will find your website by typing in brown dogs into the search engine. From here we can dig much deeper and optimize for big brown dogs, furry brown dogs, nice brown dogs or any other search phrases you want to show up for in the search engine results.

So, before you begin to build your website, you need to make a list of your competitors. You need to make a list of your keywords and key phrases. You need to analyze each of your competitors websites and see what they are doing and see how they rank in the search engines. You then need to take your keywords and you need to optimize them better than everyone else in your niche or industry.

How can you do this? Stay tuned for your next step to search engine domination…

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This is the best time of year if you are a sports fan. I wait for these few weeks every year so that I can watch basketball until my head hurts. Some of these games involve schools I have never heard of, but they are still great. The best part of this year is that my Alma mater is going dancing! American University is going to their first NCAA tournament, and unless you are familiar with the school, you probably don’t realize how much this means to everybody in DC. During my 4 years in AU, we made it to the Patriot league finals 2 times, only to lose in the last few seconds each time. There was plenty of heartbreak and misery… lots of drinking away the pain. Well, yesterday AU finally sealed the deal, and this team should be proud of themselves for not letting this game slip away in the last few minutes.

Every year there is a school like American who punches their NCAA ticket for the first time, and everytime I see a school storm the court I get excited. Is there any better moment in sports then the infamous “court storming”? It is one of the few moments in sports that you know is coming, but still makes you smile each time.

This morning I woke up to watch another small school from my hometown make the big dance. University of Maryland- Baltimore County will also be dancing for the first time in their schools history. These sort of NCAA births put a school on the map. If teams such as Holy Cross, Winthrop, George Mason, IUPUI had never made the tourney, would you know of them? This publicity goes a long way for smaller schools, and it will be exciting to see what such a win does American University, down the road with recruiting of new athletes and students. Thanks to thank win yesterday, maybe my degree is worth slightly more than it was last week?

So as you watch these small schools get completly destroyed next week against Memphis, UCLA, UNC, etc… just remember how much it means for these undersized, slightly underskilled kids just to be on the same court as those teams on national television. Maybe even consider putting AU through to the second round… anything is possible.

Video of AU students storming the court!

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Many business owners think they can handle creating a website on their own. They think they can read a book or look over a website tutorial and they will be good to go. I will tell you that if you do put the time and effort into it, yes…you can develop and code your own website. But, in the meantime you will neglect other areas of your business that should be your main focus while you are trying to learn the ins and outs of website development and marketing.

I’m a true believer in focusing on what you are good at and outsource or contract out what you are not experienced in or lack a skill set. Ultimately this will save you money. You might cringe at the cost of a website but by not having a website up and running for your business, you are losing out on a TON of potential profits by simply not having a web presence.

You have to look at a website as an essential investment for your business. It’s a piece of the puzzle that you must have in order to fully succeed and take advantage of all markets available. It’s like your employer offering a 401K with dollar for dollar match but you don’t take advantage of it. My question is, WHY aren’t you taking advantage of it? If you invest in a website for your business, it will pay off exponentially over the course of your business run. When it comes down to it, a website is cheap related to other advertising mediums such as print media, radio and TV. You can invest a couple thousand dollars into a nice website and some website marketing and it will pay off for years and years to come.

Get Website Help now and take your business to the next level. I can guarantee that your competitors are.

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