DEDICATION -

Thanks to Megan Williams for believing in this content, following through with the hard work of editing, and getting this thing organized.

Thanks to Nathan, A.J., Curtis and many others for making the book look great.

Thanks to our wonderful internet marketing customers for giving us their trust.

I II CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v

INTRODUCTION vii

1. WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN WTC 3

2. OUR WTC WEB MARKETERS 14

3. WEBSITE 29

4. TRAFFIC 110

5. CONVERSION 198

III IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing WTC was not a two-man project. It took a dedicated group of people to strategize, prepare, and execute the content found within its pages. The concepts in WTC span the web as a whole, and deciding what to include and what to mention was challenging. The group effort of myself, Zach Ball, and Megan Williams proved to be an effective combination.

Zach Ball was instrumental in the development of the concepts of the book. He and I strove to develop an internet marketing concept that was relevant to the web and to our readers. We also tried to develop a simple, teachable format. We both decided what to include, what not to include, and how to organize it.

Megan Williams agonized over every sentence and helped define and position the concepts presented in WTC. Her careful editing has turned this amateur book into something worth reading.

Making the book look like something worthwhile was the work of Nathan Smith, A.J. Ogden, and Curtis Hemmert.

Finally, thanks to all of our clients who brought their internet marketing problems to us and have trusted us to help them find solutions.

-Jon Ball, June 2014

V VI INTRO

OUR STORY

In April 2009, my wife and I sat in bankruptcy court in Santa Ana, California.

After conceding my assets and asking for mercy from creditors, my lawyer gave me a twenty-dollar bill so I could buy lunch.

This was definitely a low point in my life.

Later that day, I sat in my chair, looked out the window, and wept. I knew I was going to have to give up my passion: photography. The photography industry changed forever with the proliferation of digital cameras and the explosion of cheap alternatives. My wife and five children needed more than photography could provide. While I knew I could never give up photography as a hobby, I also knew that my life as a professional portrait photographer was over.

In 1998, I graduated from Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. After graduation, I moved my family of three back to my hometown of Boise, Idaho to start Jon Ball Photography. Art school taught me how to think critically about composition, exposure, and the overall feel of photography, but it did a terrible job of teaching me how to make money off of these skills. In other words, I brought an incredibly refined photographic technique back to Boise, but no business skills. I knew nothing about marketing, merchandising, pricing, accounting, or sales.

Luckily, I tend to be ambitious. I read many books about business. Through trial and error, I learned how to market and sell my portraits. In 2005, I sold Jon Ball Photography and moved my family of six down to Southern California to purchase the most prestigious portrait studio in the country, Charis Portraiture.

Unfortunately, I stepped right into the worst economic downturn in 25 years and the dissolution of the portrait industry.

*

After my 2009 bankruptcy, I moved back to Boise with the hope of making money in another industry. With this idea in mind, my brother Zach and I went golfing.

Boise isn’t normanlly a good place to golf in January. But in January 2010, the weather was fair and sunny. My brother had just graduated from Boise State University with a degree in political science with an emphasis on secondary education. He had completed his time as a student teacher and was ready to move forward with getting a job in the area. The job market was

VII difficult, but he was prepared to become a teacher.

As we golfed, Zach revealed that he had other dreams. He wanted to build his own company and work for himself. The Ball family has had a long history of entrepreneurship, and he wanted to follow the call when the right chance came along.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the right chance was that unusually sunny day in January. Zach told me his idea for a job search kit while we were teeing off the 9th hole. I didn’t see what we had to lose. I didn’t want my brother to give up on his dream, so I said, “Let’s do it!”

The next Monday, Zach showed up at my house and we made the plan. Our “job search kit” would take the form of a book. We’d write this book together, each taking our own sections, and then sell it online. We thought if we could sell 1,000 copies per month, we’d each make $10,000 every month, which sounded good.

Zach spent the next two months going to the Boise Public Library to write. I wrote, too. Two months later, we had Seize the Job. We finally published our book: our fifty-page, comprehensive, easy-to-follow plan designed to help job seekers find the right position.

The book was a flop. We sold one copy. We had a one-page website that received traffic from a couple of commercials we ran in Springfield, Missouri. This experience taught us that getting traffic and selling stuff online was much more difficult than we thought it would be.

The week after the commercials ran and nothing happened, the money ran out. We needed a new idea − one that seemed foolproof. Zach’s wife worked as a dental assistant. He saw the dental newsletters that dentists gave to their patients, and thought it would be a great idea to start writing and publishing them.

Zach started working every day in my home office. He’d drive the 15 miles each morning at 8:00 AM and sit at his desk. We’d write lists of things we had to do.

As a result of our dedication and organization, we wrote and produced 10 different dental newsletters. We knew nothing about dentistry, but we believed that if we wanted to do something badly enough, we could do it. I knew from my experience in portraiture that getting customers was the most vital part of any operation, so we discussed how we would attract attention to our product.

We realized that if we could get our website to rank highly in Google for the search term “Dental Newsletters,” we would get traffic and eventually we could sell our newsletters.

This realization began the odyssey that continues to this day. We purchased SEO for Dummies and read the entire book out loud. It’s a behemoth at 700+ pages. We worked assiduously on the website and its SEO properties. We found this much more rewarding than writing the newsletters themselves! After three months of effort, our site ranked on page one for “Dental

VIII Newsletters.” The phone started ringing and we started to try to make sales.

What we didn’t know at the time was that the dental newsletter industry had just gone through a major surge and was dead. No one wanted the fancy dental newsletters we ranked so highly for.

We had already booked a dental trade show in Denver, Colorado in January 2011 and were prepared to go with our newsletters, even if no one wanted to buy them.

But when Zach came to work on December 17th, he suggested that we sell SEO at the trade show instead.

As you can imagine, shifting gears in two weeks was difficult, but when the trade show rolled around we had brochures, pricing, and a very basic website detailing our services. Three days and hundreds of conversations later, we had one customer! It only took 12 months.

We booked other dental trade shows. Each trade show seemed successful, but when three trade shows passed and no one signed up for our services, things were looking bleak again.

While we studied SEO, we found that the most important part of SEO was a process called “link building.” We knew what it was − getting other sites to link to your site − but had no idea how to do it. We noticed that there was a distinct lack of quality link building services in the SEO community and started talking about transitioning from dental SEO to link building.

On a particularly low week for our new business in May 2011, I took a walk with my wife near a canal close to our home. I knew very little about link building, but I told her that it was our future. She wanted to know more about link building, but I had faith that Zach and I could take what we had learned about business and apply it to link building.

Zach and I studied, agonized, fought over, and discussed link building for hours. We hired a link building trainer, Eric Ward. He talked to us over the phone for 10 hours about the philosophies and methods of link building.

In August 2011, we went to an SEO trade show in San Francisco and started to talk about link building. We left with three customers. Thrilled, we went to other trades shows, which led to even more customers. I started to speak on the subject at SEO conferences, and the business surged ahead. The industry was ready for link builders like us. We hired our first employee in December of 2011, and as of this writing, we have over 80 employees in our office in Boise, Idaho who build links for clients all over the world.

We build links for world-class brands and mom-and-pop shops in every imaginable niche and industry.

While connecting with others in the industry brought us our first customers, we also got our site to rank highly for our keywords using SEO and link building. We captured hundreds of qualified leads each month through our website.

IX Through it all, we never stopped studying. We’ve read tons of internet marketing books and have spent thousands of hours talking about online marketing theory. Through our discussions, we started noticing patterns, trends, and best practices. We began the process of documenting our discoveries.

As we discovered how to make money online, we struggled to find any consolidated and organized body of information that gave meaning to the wild and crazy world of online marketing. We had hired many expensive “coaches” and others to help us get our footing, but mostly, we just fumbled around in the dark, figuring it out one piece at a time. Often, the information we found was bad; we had to forget it and relearn the right way. It was a painful process.

As our business became successful, our friends and family would approach us with questions about how to succeed online. What we found was that people were confused about even the most basic elements of websites and traffic. In fact, many of our friends who spend a lot of time online had questions that has us wondering what else they didn’t know.

This book is our stab at making sense of the existing world of people making money online. We have observed and organized our findings into a framework that can be discussed in a logical way and used to your benefit. The name WTC came from our discussions of what it takes to be successful online. You need all three of the elements to find success: Website, Traffic, and Conversion.

-Jon Ball, January 2014

X XI

1.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN WTC

WTC STANDS FOR WEBSITE - TRAFFIC - CONVERSION.

3 WEBSITE, TRAFFIC, CONVERSION. THESE BASIC ELEMENTS ARE LIKE FUEL, AIR, AND FIRE FOR AN ONLINE BUSINESS. YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT GOES INTO A SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE, HOW TO ATTRACT TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE, AND HOW TO CONVERT THAT TRAFFIC INTO CUSTOMERS IN ORDER TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE. WHETHER YOU’RE A SEASONED VETERAN AT MAKING MONEY ONLINE OR JUST STARTING OUT, THE INFORMATION IN WTC WILL HELP YOU DEFINE YOUR PLAN. THIS PLAN WILL GIVE YOU A STRUCTURE FOR MAKING STRATEGIC DECISIONS ABOUT DEVELOPING A BETTER WEBSITE, ACHIEVING YOUR TRAFFIC GOALS, AND FINALLY, ACTUALLY MAKING MONEY OFF OF YOUR SITE. website.

Your website is the epicenter of your online activity. It’s home plate, HQ, the center of your universe, the Taj Mahal. There has been some talk lately that Facebook pages and other resources can replace your website, but if you want to be taken seriously online, there is absolutely no substitute for your own domain website.

When your prospect lands on your site, you have about five seconds to let them know who you are, what your company’s beliefs are, what your company culture is like, how professional you are, and how seriously you take their business. Your website is the messaging vessel for your business and therefore a vital part of the process of online success. It all starts with your website. We’ll get into details about what your site should be like a little later in the book, but for now you should know that we take the “W” in WTC very seriously.

4 chapter 1 - WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN WTC traffic.

It’s every would-be web tycoon’s dream to build a website and have thousands of new visitors browsing the different pages and entering their credit card numbers. But they won’t just come because you built it. And honestly, very few people actually know how to make an effective traffic plan. To create an income from your website that you can live on, your site will need a veritable river of traffic.

And you’ll need lots of tributaries to feed that river. We’ve identified nine distinct ways that online marketers get traffic. WTC will teach you how to make your own traffic plan. conversion.

Getting a magnificent website online and building traffic will get you in the game, but you’ll win the game with conversion. Conversion is the process of getting a website visitor to take the next step with you by converting their visit into a newsletter sign-up, a purchase, a phone call, or a completed contact form. There are many factors to consider when thinking about conversion: web copy, colors, locations of forms, etc. But the serious study and application of conversion rate optimization is very important to being successful online.

The wonderful part of conversion is that if you are worrying about conversions, then you have already accomplished the first two-thirds of your project; you’re already on your way with your website and traffic.

5 not a comprehensive guidebook.

The purpose of this book is to help you make money online. This is by no means a comprehensive guidebook of what to do, how to do it, and why. Instead, this book presents a framework through which you can organize your thoughts, as well as an introduction to the common language of online professionals. The world of internet marketing is filled with buzzwords and obscure terminology, and WTC will give you a working vocabulary to use in your online business.

WTC will not address the development and establishment of a quality product or a valued brand. It’s advisable that you read other business books and consider your product, its place in the market, your customer, your competitors, the industry you’re approaching, and whatever else may be relevant to the creation of your business. Once all of these points are well in hand, the principles of WTC will help you deliver your brand and product to eager visitors.

This book is designed for you, the budding online marketer, who needs a bird’s-eye view of the landscape of web marketing. It’s meant to be a topographical map that shows you the entire landscape of internet marketing, not a street map that shows you every little detail.

For most online marketers, their knowledge about the industry was slowly acquired over time, and in most cases they had to learn and unlearn certain principles. Unlike established industries such as dentistry, there are no governing bodies, no established set of best practices, and no specialized schools or training. It’s the Wild West out there. As such, this book is intended to be read as a primer that will help you defi ne your own online marketing best practices and philosophy.

6 chapter 1 - WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN WTC Expert marketers might find this book elementary, but even seasoned marketers have new things to discover in WTC.

WTC is a starting point and a reference for you as you gain knowledge and experience with online marketing. Use this framework to build your business models, construct a traffic plan, and make money. the online gold rush.

We live in a time of unparalleled opportunity. The internet has created the most unbiased and wide- open opportunity to make money in the history of the free market. The online gold rush is unique in many ways. The web doesn’t care:

1. What race or ethnicity you are

2. Where you live

3. How you’re getting it done

People on the web only care about the utility of your website and how it can help them. As we’ve studied and observed the web, we’ve been totally blown away by some success stories and been left scratching our heads at some failures. But we’ve seen distinct patterns to success.

In the early days of the internet, the fevered pitch of online business created a bubble in the stock market. That bubble formed because people knew that the online marketplace was coming and that it was going to be huge. In fact, investors were so excited that they drove dot-com stock prices way above their value. The bubble popped and a lot of people lost a lot of money. This quelled the consumer’s desire to trust online businesses.

Nevertheless, throughout the last ten years, the online marketplace has grown at an incredible pace. Almost everyone has a great idea for a

7 website. This growth shows that we have learned how to make money online.

But unlike the gold rush of the 1800s, which was easy to understand, this gold rush has substantial knowledge barriers to entry. Many people feel compelled to join, but feel confused about how to set up a site, how to get traffi c, and how to make money at it. In fact, most people have absolutely no idea how most websites make money.

One of the most common responses to WTC has been that people had no idea any of this was going on. WTC is going to give you an overview of the wild world of online business and help you understand what is possible online. legitimate business only.

We know that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of fringe, niche, and/or unusual methods for making money online. There are scams and illicit methods to bilk others out of their hard-earned money. We strongly oppose these methods based on our principles and morals.

The framework of WTC is premised on established principles of hard work, determination, planning, strategizing, and execution. We never wanted to run a fly-by-night business. We were always interested in building a solid business to provide our families with income and opportunity for the future. If these beliefs resonate with you, then WTC will take you to the next step.

8 chapter 1 - WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN WTC strategize, plan, and execute.

As we built our business, we adopted a mantra that we repeat every day. That mantra is “strategize, plan, and execute.” It may seem simple, but it’s the baseline process that underlies our success.

STRATEGIZE Before you make your first dollar online, you need to have a strategy. Whether you plan to sell baby cribs, make a web developer community site, or start a personal blog about birding, it pays to develop a strategy regarding what you’re going to do and why. An online business must know what type of site it needs, how it will make money, and what its online goals are. Further, the content and concept of the site must be consistent with your plan to get traffic.

Without traffic, running your website will feel like a depressing endeavor. Setting up a website that fails to receive traffic is like setting up a gorgeous retail store and not having anyone come in to shop.

Developing a logical and effective conversion strategy is also part of the strategizing process.

Once you think these pieces through in a careful way, you will be ready to make your plan.

PLAN While strategizing will help you define what your goals are, your plan will help you figure out how you will reach them. This crucial step takes your high- level strategic objectives and turns them into a list of things to do.

We attempted lots of different methods for making plans, but the one that we found most successful and productive was when we put the objective on the top

9 of a page and wrote everything that had to be done in order to meet that objective below it. Basically, we made a to-do list. When the list was fi nished, we divvied the tasks between us and set a date for completion.

At the end of our work day, we spent the last 15 minutes reviewing our plan and adjusting our to-do list. We identifi ed what was most important to do the next day and made that item the priority for the following day. That way, when we returned to work the next day, we had our to-do list already and could jump right back into action.

This method worked particularly well on Thursday afternoons. Because we decided to work four instead of fi ve days a week, our three-day weekends would almost wipe out any memory of the exact nuances of what we were working on. Our updated to-do lists were fresh for us to get going on Monday morning. It worked like a charm—we completed immense amounts of work in the four-day work week, and we almost never had useless days. We charged ahead with our strategy.

Of course, there are a lot of different ways to plan out the work you need to do to achieve your objectives, but however you do it, make sure that everyone knows who has to do what by when. Those two details will turn a wish list into an actionable to-do list.

EXECUTE Executing your plan is the hard part, and is where 90% of potential websites fail.

It takes determination and resolve to execute your plans. When we started our business, we had absolutely nothing going on. No customers, no contacts, nothing. But we came up with a strategy, made a plan, and wrote lists of what we needed to do. The secret to our success was that we had a good plan, and we followed it to the letter. We never quit. We showed up every day and worked all day. It felt impossible at times, but we just kept going. Other successful people will tell you that the same thing worked for them.

10 chapter 1 - WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN WTC Bo Eason, a former NFL athlete, wrote Runt of the Litter, his one-man play that ran on Broadway for many years, at a coffee shop in Los Angeles each day for three hours after finishing his job delivering food in the early morning. When asked how he did it, he said “I just did it. No one showed me how to do it. I just kept going. I didn’t give up, I didn’t quit.”

We believe in this method. We believe in the human spirit. We believe in the power and intelligence of people. We are all so savvy and so sophisticated. We are all much smarter than we give ourselves credit for. When we feel that we can’t do something because we don’t have a degree or a guru or a certificate, we discredit ourselves and limit our potential. Lack of certification or training becomes another excuse on the list of excuses for why we don’t achieve our dreams.

If you want to do anything, then you must start and learn as you go. How do you become a photographer? Start taking photographs. How do you become a playwright? Start writing plays. How do you become an online marketer? Start marketing online. It’s as simple as that.

Our first online project was to sell a book about how to get a job. We had never written a book, but we knew we could do it if we tried. We made an outline and wrote the book in two months. Once the book was done, we made a one-page website and aired some commercials in Springfield, Missouri. We sold one book for $24.99. It was at that moment that we realized that the task of selling things online and getting traffic was more difficult that we had originally thought. It humbled us, but we knew that we could succeed. It would just take time, a strategy, a plan, and dedication to our plan.

The point is that you can do this. You can become a successful online businessperson. You’ll fail; everyone does. Don’t doubt that you can improve and learn. Change your plan and keep going. You already have the innate ability to survive and thrive.

11 this is serious.

To make the principles in WTC work, you need to have something worthwhile to say or sell on your website. You need to be serious about making money. You must be willing to fail and learn and fail and learn again. Your website’s content should be valuable, unique, and well-crafted. Succeeding online is a serious endeavor, and only serious students will be rewarded.

Many people underestimate the challenges inherent in making money online. They assume that it’s not as diffi cult as starting a traditional business. But our experience has been that starting and earning a living from an online business is every bit as diffi cult, if not even more diffi cult, than many would-be internet tycoons believe. It will take time, money, and serious thinking.

But the wonderful part about the online gold rush is that plenty of people have successfully navigated the waters of making a website, getting traffic, and converting that traffic into money. And you can do it too.

12 chapter 1 - WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN WTC 13 2.

OUR WTC WEB MARKETERS

STORIES TO ILLUMINATE

14 chapter 2 - OUR WTC WEB MARKETERS AS WE REVEAL THE WTC PHILOSOPHY AND PRACTICE, WE’LL PUT THE CONCEPTS INTO CONTEXT THROUGH A SET OF STORIES. THESE STORIES WILL HELP ILLUMINATE THE OTHERWISE ABSTRACT PRINCIPLES OF WTC.

Our WTC Web Marketers’ successes and failures will be woven throughout the book to help illustrate the principles so you can gain a more complete understanding of how they work.

These marketers are fi ctional. They are, however, an amalgamation of many of the people we’ve met over the course of our internet marketing journey.

We’ve tried to blend ages, life situations, and other variables into their experience, but understand that you won’t fi nd their websites online because neither these marketers, nor their websites, actually exist. DARYL JENNIFER BILL RANDY KAREN JAVIER DARYL. the greeting card guy

41 - Married - Father of two young children

Daryl has always been an artist. While other kids were outside playing soccer, Daryl was on the playground sketching, making sculptures from rocks or sticks, or thinking about painting. He won the “most likely to be famous” award his senior year of school and went right to Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Daryl especially loved the oil painting classes—just the smell of the oil made him happy. He could often be found in the studio painting past midnight. When he graduated from Otis, Daryl took a job with a prestigious design fi rm. He worked there for 10 years until Daryl’s wife prematurely gave birth to their second child. This left her confi ned to the hospital for a month and a half. Daryl needed to be at home to care for his family full-time.

Secretly, Daryl was glad that he was forced to quit. His boss was a jerk. Even so, he became nervous about how he was going to earn a living without a steady paycheck. Soon after he quit his job, a family friend who owned a chain of tire stores hired him to do some design work as a freelancer. He started to accept other jobs from friends and quickly grew his own design fi rm. Within a few years he became so busy that he worked 80-100 hours a week and frequently pulled all-nighters.

When he turned 40, he could feel his body rejecting his schedule.

Getting out of bed became more and more diffi cult. One night, he pulled an all-nighter doing web layout for a client and fell asleep at his work table. His wife woke him up that morning at 10 AM. He had missed two appointments, even as his cell phone buzzed in his pocket. Something had to change. He was missing all of his kids’ gymnastics meets and school performances, and gray hair was coming on fast.

16 chapter 2 - OUR WTC WEB MARKETERS His kids went to private school in an expensive area. He didn’t feel like he could afford to slow down. While he was building his design fi rm, he started the tradition of illustrating a funny greeting card for his family and friends each Christmas. It was fun for him. He’d design three or four different cards a year. The cards were kind of like The Far Side comics— they poked fun at modern culture in a lighthearted way. Everybody loved them.

The positive reception of his cards led to an idea: if he could make a bunch of these cards, he could sell them online.

If he could just get enough people to buy them, then maybe he could make money while he was sleeping. The idea excited him so much that he called his banker to see how much cash he could get out of his house on a second mortgage.

His idea was simple: build an e-commerce site and sell greeting cards. He contacted a friend who was a web developer.

The profi t on the cards would be high because he could print them at his shop for a few cents and sell them for about $5. He fi gured that he’d have to sell about 2000 cards a month to make $8000 profi t, which would allow him to back off of his day-to-day client work and to spend his time doing what he really wanted to do: make beautiful and interesting fi ne oil paintings. He knew that if he could start his site and then hire someone to run it for him, he would receive recognition for his paintings. He just needed the time to paint.

His brushes and paint tubes haven’t come out of the box from their last move three years ago.

17 JENNIFER. the personal fi nance coach

53 - Married - Mother of two college-aged kids

Jennifer has always had a knack for helping people with their fi nancial troubles. She helped balance her mother’s checkbook and manage the family fi nances when she was a teenager. She majored in accounting at school and has worked jobs as a bookkeeper and an accountant for 30 years. She was busy, and found that working full-time while raising her kids was exhausting.

She’d come home from work, make dinner, clean up, help her kids with their homework, and pass out on the bed every weeknight. She hated that she couldn’t spend more time with her children. Her husband, Vic, worked at a powder coating shop when he was younger and started his own shop while their kids were young. He’d come home from the shop, see Jennifer asleep on the bed each night, and wish that she didn’t have to work so hard.

It took almost 20 years for his business to become successful enough that Jennifer could stay home. When this fi nally happened, she felt so happy that she cried on his shoulder.

Jennifer felt compassion for people who needed guidance for their financial future. She didn’t have a degree in financial planning, but she had developed her own philosophies and household formulas that allowed her family to live on one income while Vic wasn’t bringing home any pay. Her sensibilities were so keen that she frequently found herself advising her friends.

After a few years of retirement, Jennifer started to feel like she had to do something to help others. She believed that she had a lot to offer to the world, and staying home was more boring than she thought it would be.

18 chapter 2 - OUR WTC WEB MARKETERS She had a friend who was going to a seminar about the “experts industry” and it piqued her interest. At the seminar, she learned that there was an entire industry of people who were experts at all sorts of things. She met a man who was an expert at fi xing lawn mower engines, a woman who could teach others how to read palms, and a man who helped businesses fi nd inexpensive loans so that they could grow. On the fl ight home, she realized that she had found her next project. Under the glow of the reading light she wrote the fi rst copy of her personal fi nance coaching product. It was easy for her.

She hired the guru at the seminar to help her build her product line.

Within a few months, she wrote an e-book, made a CD set, developed a workbook to go along with a webinar series, and set up a series of personal coaching phone call packages. Her guru was extremely helpful in devising ways to organize her information and to price them to industry standards. The time she spent writing the book and making the workbook were some of the happiest days she had experienced in many years. She worked hard to gain her expertise. She was surprised at how substantial it looked when it was all done.

Jennifer knew nothing about internet marketing. She didn’t know how to obtain a website, how to maintain a website, how to get traffi c, nothing.

Her guru helped her get started by giving her a page on his expert marketplace site, but she wasn’t getting any traffi c. Jennifer was anxious to make money and help people. But how?

19 BILL. the attorney

67 - Married - Father of three adult children

Bill is an attorney who specializes in bankruptcy law. He has been running his law fi rm for nearly 30 years with two other attorneys who specialize in family law. Bill has three children: two sons and Christina, a jewel of a daughter, who he named after his grandmother.

Bill has had an extremely diffi cult time relating to Christina since she graduated from college. In school, she met and fell in love with a “wild child” musician named Hunter. She lived with him over the last couple years of college. She married Hunter last summer, and at the wedding, Bill found himself leaning against the bar and swirling his wine too much. He felt like she could have done better. Christina knew that if her father would just get to know Hunter, he would realize “how awesome he is.”

Hunter has played in a rock band on the weekends and has earned enough to pay the rent. Christina’s pay as a legal secretary has paid the bills.

Christina and Hunter frequently ask Bill for money. Hunter knows that his band isn’t going anywhere. The drummer and bassist have accepted full-time jobs and as a result, their rehearsal time has been drastically reduced. Hunter has been spending his days managing his band’s website and internet presence. He wants to try and turn that into a career.

Christina has convinced her father to hire Hunter and allow him to try and bring Bill’s marketing into the 21st century. Bill has been skeptical of internet marketing because he worked with an internet marketer five years ago and it ended in disaster. After much hand-wringing, Bill called Christina and hired Hunter.

20 chapter 2 - OUR WTC WEB MARKETERS Hunter walked into Bill’s offi ce wearing torn jeans and a t-shirt on the fi rst day of work. Bill groaned, but he remembered Christina’s cheerful reaction to his decision to hire her husband. He forced himself to shake Hunter’s hand and showed him to his cubicle. Hunter took his seat, turned on his computer, and turned around to see Bill watching him.

Hunter loaded the practice’s website and turned to Bill. “This site really sucks, man.”

21 RANDY. the pet blogger

63 - Divorced/Single - No children

When Randy started his blog about the rights and the proper care of pets, he did it out of his natural desire to help animals. Randy’s compassion for animals developed in childhood and only grew stronger as he grew older. The only time he ever got in a fi st-fi ght was because he stepped in front of the neighborhood bully, who was about to kick a stray cat.

In his city, Randy has a wide network of friends and family members who have helped him in his crusade to raise money for the local animal shelter. He has worked in nearly every pet service business in his town and has made very little money. Most recently, he has taken a job with a company that sells pet insurance.

Randy has had a terrible time with his supervisor. In order to motivate the sales staff, Randy’s boss has been talking about “cutting” someone from the sales team. Randy is the lowest performer by a small margin, so he feels like there’s a big target on his back every time he walks into work. His friend at work, Jerry, knows that Randy should be doing something more interesting than selling pet insurance.

As the situation at work had been going on for many months, Randy feels like the talk of laying someone off has merely been a ploy to motivate better performance. He is getting older and can’t afford to retire, so he is looking for a way to work for himself. Jerry has suggested that he make money from his website by selling pet supplies, so he’s been considering that.

Randy has no experience with online marketing and sales. The prospect of making money off of his website has seemed both confusing and overwhelming. A few hundred people read Randy’s blog each time he posts a new article. He feels that it’s his duty to help

22 chapter 2 - OUR WTC WEB MARKETERS people recognize the rights of animals and learn how to take care of their pets.

Randy wants to work for himself, make a decent living, and provide for his retirement. He is starting to listen to Jerry about making money on his site. He just doesn’t know how to do it.

23 KAREN. the healthy food blogger

46 - Divorced/Single - Mother of three school-aged children

When Karen gave birth to her fi rst child at the age of 28, she was totally unprepared for the challenge of having a child who was allergic to dairy, gluten, and nuts. Feeding her son was a learning process, especially because Karen has never had time to cook multiple meals. She has worked as an offi ce manager at a busy dental practice most of her adult life. Her time has been particularly short since she divorced her husband, who would help with the cooking.

Karen has always felt compelled to write. At school, Karen thrived in her writing courses, but her father convinced her to go into business management. Nevertheless, Karen has translated her experience cooking for her son into a healthy cooking blog, which has helped her get her voice out there. A few hundred people have subscribed to her blog, and these followers get an email whenever Karen publishes a new blog post. However, these emails are only sent sporadically—Karen rarely has time to blog because she’s so busy.

On her blog, Karen tells a lot of stories about taking care of her son in the days before the internet. “No one really understands how hard it was to fi nd recipes and information back then. We all take our internet connections for granted now.”

Before the internet, she had taken her son to the emergency room dozens of times as a result of his allergies. She had to fi nd recipes at the public library and also from friends and healthcare providers.

Now, when she has free time at work or at home, Karen scours the web looking for healthy recipe sites. She has read every healthy cooking blog more than once, so a couple of years ago, she started her own

24 chapter 2 - OUR WTC WEB MARKETERS WordPress blog to talk about her experiences and to post recipes that have worked for her.

Karen’s blog uses a pretty, simple, free template on Wordpress.com, and although she knows what she likes in a blog and how she wants her blog to fl ow, she has no idea how to build the blog she wants. She only knows that it would be expensive to do. The idea of quitting her job at the dental practice and making money from her blog seems too good to be true. Karen thinks maybe she could sell recipes on her site to make money, but she knows that this would be risky. She needs to provide stability for her kids.

She hopes to get paid to talk about healthy cooking for families, as this is a niche that she feels is wildly underrepresented online.

25 JAVIER. the musician

28 - Single - No children

Javier has been in a band ever since his brother quit playing the bass. When his brother left the band, Javier agreed to take his place. He didn’t know how to play, but it was easy enough to improvise through simple rock songs. He was three years younger than any of the other guys in the band. He felt proud of himself for that.

Now he plays bass in three bands and helps struggling musicians fi gure out how to fi ne-tune their sound, pick out songs, fi nd a place to record, and score gigs. He loves it.

Javier’s father passed away while he was in college, so he had to come back home to help his mother and younger sister take care of the family. He is able to live simply off of the inheritance his father left for him, but he knows that this money will run out in about fi ve years. He had planned on becoming a famous musician by now, but he just can’t seem to break through. He dreads the thought of working a regular job, but if he has to, he will.

Javier knows about every indie band in the area. He goes to live music shows whenever he can and is extremely active within a variety of music communities online. He really knows his stuff. He can tell you exactly which Marshall Amp stack would work best in a small venue and which mic system is best for getting a bright sound from a drum set.

He and a friend started an online Q-and-A discussion board about how to be successful in a band. The board includes categories on all of the topics he helps his friends with. Javier’s site also features a podcast and other forms of music-related information. The site receives some traffi c and engagement, but not enough to be exciting.

26 chapter 2 - OUR WTC WEB MARKETERS Javier dreams of being online full-time, making money on his music site. He wants to express his musical expertise in tutorials and videos that he would then sell to amateur bands and musicians. He knows his information is valuable and that people would probably pay for it.

CONCLUSION.

OUR WTC MARKETERS ALL HAVE TWO THINGS IN COMMON: THEY ALL DREAM OF TAKING PART IN THE ONLINE GOLD RUSH, AND THEY ALL FEEL UNSURE OF WHERE TO START.

They are representative of millions of people who feel the same way. WTC was written for them and for you. It will show you how to form a plan to make money. When you’ve completed this book, you’ll be armed with enough knowledge to make a plan and get started. As you progress, you’ll be able to use the WTC principles to adjust and refi ne your plan.

27 28 3.

WEBSITE

WORLDWIDE INFLUENCE AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

29 IT CAN BE FUN TO PUBLISH A WEBSITE. YOU GET TO FEEL KIND OF IMPORTANT BECAUSE ANYONE IN THE WORLD COULD READ WHAT YOU HAVE WRITTEN OR POSTED.

But that feeling of importance can dwindle in a few months and when it’s gone— when the novelty is over— it’s time to make money with your website.

Making money with your website isn’t too diffi cult as long as you approach it like a professional. As we stated before, professionals strategize, plan, then execute their plan. When a professional wants to build a site, they don’t merely look for a cool looking site that mimics what they want their site to be like. This is the web development strategy of an amateur.

After an amateur fi nds the site they’d like to model theirs after, they will generally ask their friend, cousin, or friend’s cousin to build the site for them. After the site is similar to the one they like, they fi nd articles and content online that they like, and they copy and paste it onto their pages.

Next, they wonder how in the world they’ll get traffi c to their site. They try a few things that they read about online and then when they don’t immediately get the results they want, they give up.

A professional won’t give up as easily. Before the professional even thinks about what their site might look like, they’ll determine how they will make money with their website. These money-making methods help the professional to identify their goals and what kind of site they have. Having these elements in place will make it easier to defi ne conversion goals for the site, strategize a traffi c plan, and then fi nally execute all of the steps that go into developing the site itself.

This section will be divided into two distinct subsections. The fi rst is the WTC 3/5/7 concept. There are three types of money-making websites, fi ve ways to make money from them, and seven distinct goals that website visitors can achieve. The 3/5/7 concept

30 chapter 3 - WEBSITE gives you a complete explanation of what you might be able to do to earn money online. It will also give you a framework to use when you explore the web. You’ll be able to break down any website into a simple categorization model. It’ll demystify the web for you.

The second section will teach you the way a professional builds a website. We’ll discuss the basics of how the web works and then go into the twelve steps to building a website. The difference between the way a professional and an amateur go about this process will be highlighted. When it comes to actually building the site, we’ll discuss the seven elements of web design. Learning these elements will absolutely change the way you see the web.

When you finish with the W in WTC, you’ll see the web in a whole new way. The mystery and confusion that you might feel when you think about making money online will be replaced with an organized framework that will illuminate the seemingly endless options presented with online marketing. You’ll be empowered to make good decisions about where to take your website.

31 three types of websites.

There are literally trillions of websites on the internet. Websites exist for every conceivable interest and purpose. But if you want to build an online business and make money, there are only three types of websites you need to consider:

1. E-Commerce

2. Lead Generation

3. Media

These sites are easily classifiable, and you can make money with any one of these sites in a number of ways.

1. E-COMMERCE E-commerce is usually the fi rst kind of website people think of when they want to make money online. An e-commerce website is a site that sells goods and/ or services. In other words, it’s an online store. The defi ning characteristic of an e-commerce website is that the homepage’s main feature is products for sale, not content or other information. Also, with an e-commerce site, the transaction happens on your site. Other types of websites may also sell products on them, but if your website’s main focus is selling products, you’re running an e-commerce site.

Your e-commerce website can make money a number of ways in addition to e-commerce. You could sell advertising, participate in affi liate sales, and sell your products via a monthly subscription. But your online store is all about selling your products.

You don’t have to sell your own products on your e-commerce site. Expedia.com makes its money from selling other companies’ fl ights, hotels rooms, and rental car options, and visitors can select and

32 chapter 3 - WEBSITE purchase them in one convenient place. But they don’t deliver or fulfill these flights, hotels, or rental cars, and this makes them an affiliate.

Another example of an e-commerce site that sells products they don’t deliver is Childrensbookstore. com. Childrensbookstore.com is an e-commerce website that sells children’s books. They have formed a relationship with a major book retailer to fulfill their orders. They sell books and then a wholesale outlet ships them. The owners of Childrensbookstore. com don’t have any of their books in their offices. They don’t own their own warehouses. Their customers complete the order on their site, and their partner ships them to the end customer.

Netflix.com is an example of a very successful e-commerce website that uses a monthly subscription model. You may not immediately associate it with e-commerce, but that’s what it is. They sell access to their library of video content. Netflix is an e-commerce site that makes its money with a paid subscription model. The goal of Netflix’s website is to sell subscriptions.

It’s clear that Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach is starting an e-commerce website. Her main goal is to sell her personal coaching products. She’s going to feature them on her homepage with special offers, testimonials, and links to the landing pages for her different offerings. Jennifer’s primary goal is to sell her information products. Her site will fulfill other goals, but she’s leading with the offer for her products.

Daryl the Greeting Card Guy is in the same boat. He wants to sell his greeting cards, so that’s what he’s leading with. Like Jennifer, he’s trying to do other things as well, but when visitors come to his site, it’ll be very obvious that he’s attempting to sell his cards. As you can see, you can spot an e-commerce website by what the site has on its homepage. If a site has products, prices, specials, features, benefits, etc., it’s probably an e-commerce site. If there isn’t a shopping cart and a checkout feature, it’s not an e-commerce site.

33 An e-commerce website can also be identifi ed by its content. The content on an e-commerce site tends to be promotional—not editorial—in nature. For example, content on Daryl and Jennifer’s sites will support their goals of selling their products. Because of this, visitors to e-commerce websites are automatically skeptical of anything that is said. They know what’s going on. Therefore, everything that’s said on the site is a little tainted. The level of trust is compromised, but this is just part of the package with e-commerce.

This is why placing online reviews on e-commerce websites is so popular. People trust reviews. They could read 500 words that you’ve written about the benefi ts of your products and have it all discredited by a 25-word review. In this way, reviews on your own e-commerce site can be a double-edged sword.

E-commerce is big. Billions of dollars in sales are generated through e-commerce each month, but it’s not the only kind of site you can run.

2. LEAD GENERATION Lead generation is the most abundant type of site online. Millions of local businesses rely on their lead generation sites to get them business every day. If e-commerce sites are like stores, lead generation sites are like online brochures. They “sell” or generate leads for products that are too elaborate or expensive to sell online. The defi ning characteristic of a lead generation site is that it’s going to highlight features and benefi ts of the product or service it’s trying to generate leads for.

Lead generation sites either generate leads for themselves or leads to sell to other businesses. Edmunds.com exists to collect leads and sell them. Our link building company, Page One Power, has a site that generates leads that we use to sell our link building services.

Just like an e-commerce site, you can also spot a lead generation site by its content. Its content is promotional in nature. For example, Bill the Attorney has a lead generation site. His site won’t talk about

34 chapter 3 - WEBSITE the pros and cons of hiring his law firm. He’ll only present the reasons to hire him. Page One Power won’t talk about its failures, only its successes.

A lead generation site is a site dedicated to the goal of getting a lead to call, fill out a contact form, or walk into your place of business, not to sell something right here and now, like an e-commerce website.

The goal of generating leads can be very challenging, and millions of people rely on their lead generation sites to deliver qualified leads to them every day. Bill is one of these people. He wants potential clients to call him from his site.

3. MEDIA If an e-commerce website is like a retail store and a lead generation site is like a brochure, a media site is like a magazine.

Media sites are dedicated to the distribution of free information. They give away editorial information for the benefit of mankind. You can spot a media site because the homepage is usually filled with headlines that lead to content on the site, not products like on an e-commerce site, or the features and benefits of a product or service like you would find on a lead generation site.

Facebook.com isn’t the first website people think of when we first explain a media site, but that’s what it is. Facebook provides customized, user-generated content that people come back to over and over again. The content on Facebook is editorial— it’s generated by people talking about their lives and sharing photos for the benefit of their “friends.” But Facebook is only able to exist because they sell advertising. That’s how they make their money. They sell both display and text ads on the sidebars of their site.

Karen the Healthy Food Blogger doesn’t realize it, but she is starting a media site—almost like a healthy cooking magazine. People will visit her site because the content is free, valuable, and editorial. She plans to consistently post new recipes and cooking tips, host

35 free webinars, and interview chefs on her blog. Her visitors will return time and time again to see what’s new on her site. Her content will be the reason she succeeds or fails. She will make money in a number of ways, but people will come to her site because it’s full of valuable free information.

Randy the Pet Blogger is starting a media site, too. His editorial content about animal rights pulls in visitors and keeps them there.

Javier the Musician has a media site. People interact with each other on his free forum, which has generated tons of valuable information. If he can maintain high-quality content on his forum, his site will continue to grow and so will his income.

There are thousands of blogs maintained by people across the web who aren’t trying to make money. They blog just to be heard. If they wanted to make money with them, like Randy does, what their sites would require is quality, niche content.

It really can’t be said enough. Quality, niche content is vital to the success of a media site. Sloppy writing, bad photography, inaccurate research, and poorly- presented graphics all work to ruin the effectiveness of a media site. If CNN.com had lousy articles and photos, they wouldn’t keep their readership.

We had a friend who maintained a personal blog for years. The blog posts he wrote were fun to read and were accompanied by great photos. The blog talked about his life and the growth of his children. It was read by friends and family.

He recently switched gears with his blog. He started to write about his religion and how his personal beliefs impacted his feelings on social and moral issues. The subject matter resonated with a lot more people than his old blog did. A year after his switch, he has thousands of readers and he’s been featured on other major religious blogs. He was already writing good stuff, but he attracted an audience when he started writing niche content that interested a

36 chapter 3 - WEBSITE specific group of people. It’s important to remember that both niche and quality content are necessary.

Randy’s blog has experienced a great deal of success because he writes about a topic that has an audience. His point-of-view and fun writing style are the reason that he has an opportunity to be successful. His skill as a writer will allow him to use his media site as a platform for earning a living.

The only drawback to a media site is that you have to continually make new content. You’ve effectively started your own online magazine. Even sites that have user-generated content have a big job keeping that content clean, of decent quality, and on point. Javier constantly fights with his forum members to keep the subject on music. Karen has to keep adding recipes and new blog posts, and Randy has to maintain fresh content as well.

The advantage to the media site is that traffic can be easier to draw. On the flip side, that traffic is there to get your free information, so you have to get their attention so they’ll convert and you’ll make money. But if you have something valuable to offer, people will stick around.

E-commerce and lead generation sites don’t have this advantage. All three sites have huge potential. They all feature different kinds of content, but share one thing in common: they need to make money.

37 fi ve ways to make money online.

Okay, so e-commerce sites make money by selling products, and lead generation sites make money by selling or converting leads, but how does a media site make money?

In our experience, most people seem to think the best way to make money online is to sell something online via e-commerce. The truth is that e-commerce, lead generation, and media sites can—and should— generate income in multiple ways. E-commerce is just one of the fi ve different ways to make money from your website. You can make money through:

1. Affi liate Sales (also called Affi liate Marketing)

2. Advertising

3. Paid Subscription

4. Lead Generation

5. E-Commerce

Knowing the entire list of how to make money online opens up all the channels available to you, and allows you to make a complete, informed, professional plan.

1. AFFILIATE SALES (AFFILIATE MARKETING) Affi liate sales, also called affi liate marketing, involves sending traffi c from your site to another site with the hopes that these web users will buy something, sign up for something, or fulfi ll whatever other goals the other site has established. You get paid when the visitor you sent completes a transaction on the other site.

Simply put, with affi liate marketing, you make money by selling other people’s products, like a salesperson might get a commission or a fi nder’s fee. The

38 chapter 3 - WEBSITE difference between e-commerce sales and affiliate sales is that the customer’s transaction will take place on the site you refer them to, not yours. Also, the service, delivery, and customer care will be handled by the other site. You’re just a messenger delivering traffic. Conversely, an e-commerce transaction occurs on your site and you are responsible for the transaction and delivery of the product or service.

The website Expedia is all about affiliate sales. They have built one of the most elaborate and successful affiliate websites on the planet. They sell flights, hotel rooms, rental cars, and vacation packages for hundreds of providers, and they survive off the commissions from the sales. Expedia never even has to talk to any of their customers. They represent one of the most advanced forms of affiliate marketing out there.

Amazon is a good example of a site that welcomes affiliate traffic. They have a robust affiliate program that is easy to set up. Many publishers (the industry term for a person who publishes a website) build websites that review or promote products, or that just have links going to products on Amazon.com. Using tracking codes that are built into the URLs, Amazon tracks the progress of the visitor to their site. When that visitor successfully does what Amazon wants them to do, you get credit and get paid for bringing that traffic to their site.

Entire online empires are built using this little known but lucrative form of online business.

Newcomers to affiliate marketing might be surprised to know that there are entire conferences (Affiliate Summit, Affiliate Management Days, and others) dedicated to servicing this vibrant way to make a buck online. The affiliate industry is rather diverse. Among the ranks of affiliate marketers are spammers who email millions of people with links going to pages with pills for sale, publishers with websites dedicated to the review of high-end medical equipment that link to manufacturer websites, and everyone you can imagine in between. Most advanced

39 web marketers have a plethora of affi liate links that they try to get clicks from, and many esteemed websites have sneaky affi liate links on their pages.

Make no mistake, affi liate sales are big. Really big.

Affi liate sales are paid for by the party that handles the actual transaction. For example, you could set up a site that sells plane tickets for United Airlines, and the fi nal transaction would go through the United Airlines system. This means that United Airlines pays you, the affi liate, for directing sales to their site via yours.

Another example of an affi liate site is thisiswhyimbroke.com. This cool website lists an assortment of interesting products. It’s a hand- curated collection that you can click through and buy. The links on the site are connected to their Amazon affi liate accounts, and when you click on products and buy them from Amazon, Thisiswhyimbroke.com makes money from your purchase. Amazon has done a phenomenal job of building their affi liate marketing network, and this site provides a good example of using their affi liate program.

Affiliate sales don’t only exist on this scale, of course. Affiliate links can live anywhere a visitor can click from: a web page on your site, a review on a review site, a mobile text message, an email message, etc. Anywhere that someone can click a link is a place to make money.

For instance, take Randy the Pet Blogger. You may recall that Randy cares very much about pets and animal rights. His media website receives many likeminded visitors every day. He wants his visitors to feel safe commenting on his posts about animal care and abuse, so he aims to keep the content editorial when possible. But he needs to make money, and he could easily do this through establishing affi liate relationships and placing relevant affi liate links on his site.

We recommended that Randy make a list of companies that make products he would be willing to endorse,

40 chapter 3 - WEBSITE and then form affiliate relationships with these companies either through Amazon’s affiliate program or through the companies themselves. Most savvy e-commerce websites have established affiliate programs. If they don’t, then it is your duty to ask them to set one up.

Once Randy has established these relationships, he could add a page to his site and call it something like “Randy’s Recommendations.” This web page could be filled with links to the pet products he wants to endorse. He could hire a web developer to build a functionality on that page that would categorize the products by type of pet, product, or price range.

We also recommended that he point out that his site is partially funded by his readers buying the products from the links on his site. Because he has built such a great rapport with his readers, he should find success with his approach.

Javier the Musician could also benefit from forming affiliate relationships on his media site. Though he initially hoped to sell his information products online, we pointed out that Javier may have a problem: the visitors to his site are mostly young and broke, and selling something to people without much money can be difficult. In addition to this, his users tend to be very web-savvy, and if one of them purchased the documents, they would most likely find their way onto a free download site. E-commerce just won’t suit his media site.

Because of this, we recommended that Javier build an email list to which he could send tips, articles, and other information that his clients might like. Javier could make money by including affiliate links in his email newsletters instead of by trying to sell his information products.

He could also benefit from including advertising in these email blasts and on his site.

41 2. ADVERTISING Usually, two simple strategies come to people’s minds when they think about how to make money online. One of these is e-commerce; the other is advertising.

As a society, we’re familiar with advertising. We’re constantly being advertised to. Companies all around the world want to get their messages in front of qualifi ed prospects, and online advertising is a great way to do it. The web has opened up new opportunities for advertisers and has given publishers new ways to distribute advertising.

As a publisher, the key to earning ad revenue is to attract traffic. Without traffic, you can’t make money by advertising. Traffic equals ad revenue. It’s really that simple. Advertising is a great way to make money online if you intend to build a high- traffic site like Javier the Musician’s or Karen the Healthy Food Blogger’s.

There are essentially three different types of ads that you can host on your site to make money:

1. Display Ads

2. Text Ads

3. Advertorials/Native Advertising

Display Ads Display ads are the little advertising graphics that are found all over the web. An advertisement will often be labeled as an ad in the corner of the ad itself. The discipline of creating display ads and using them to get traffi c will be discussed in the “Traffi c” section of this book. Display ads can be tall and skinny (often called skyscraper ads) or boxy. There are established dimensions for ads that many ad networks use.

Text Ads Text ads can be found all over the web. The most obvious place that you can see them is in the Google search results. Their text-based ads, called Google AdWords, are clicked by millions of people every day.

42 chapter 3 - WEBSITE These ads are located at the top and right hand side of the search results of almost every search engine result page (called SERP) in Google. Google places the word “ads” near the ads so the user knows that these are paid ads.

For normal publishers (not just Google), text ads are a great way to make money by advertising. They take up very little room on your website or email blasts, and people will click on them. We buy advertising space on a major search engine media site to get leads for our company, Page One Power. One of the ads we buy from them is a 70-character text ad near their top navigation on their homepage. We get a ton of clicks, and the ad fits very nicely on their website. We also run the same text ad in their email newsletter blasts. We’re happy to buy it from them, and they’re happy to sell it to us.

We believe the same would be true for Javier the Musician if he were to sell ads like the major search engine media site Page One Power advertises on. While he may want to consider including display ads on his site, text ads could be a great addition to his emails. Finding advertisers for his email blasts will take work. He’ll have to do some prospecting and selling to earn a steady cash flow from his emails, but we know he can do it.

Advertorials and Native Advertising Advertorials and Native Advertising refer to a range of quasi-editorial/advertising content that you can sell to place on your site. Advertorials are content/ blog posts that an advertiser has written that they pay another website to publish. Native Advertising is generally content that advertisers pay the blog or publication to create and publish that is designed to match the tone and style of that publication. Bloggers refer to both as “Sponsored Posts.” Sponsored posts are usually editorial, in that the content is meant to interest the blog’s readers, but it’s also advertising, because the content highlights a product or process that the advertiser is selling.

43 These work particularly well on media sites. Karen the Healthy Food Blogger, for instance, might make arrangements with a knife company that would pay her to place a blog post the company has written about how to butcher a chicken at home. The article will describe how to do it with the tools that they sell. As she develops her traffi c, she’ll probably get approached by more cooking product companies that will pay her to host sponsored posts.

Bloggers aren’t the only ones in on the advertorial game, though. Bodybuilding.com gets paid a lot of money by supplement companies to post workout schedules that give fi tness buffs a realistic timeline for building muscle. The schedule provides the workout of the day, the best methods for building muscle, and the recommended meal supplement plan.

If your site has good, targeted traffi c, you are eligible to make money with advertorials and native advertising.

Ways to Sell Your Ads to Advertisers As a publisher, there are three ways that you can sell ads to your advertisers:

1. Clicks

2. Impressions

3. Acquisitions

Clicks The fi rst way that you can sell ads to your advertisers is by selling clicks. When you run an ad and someone clicks on it, the advertiser pays you a certain amount for that click. Clicks are easy to monitor and easy to charge for. Many sites set a price per click and tally up the total at the end of the month. Advertisers are used to paying for their advertising this way. It’s the most straightforward, simple way to charge for advertising on your site.

44 chapter 3 - WEBSITE Impressions Each time an ad is displayed on a web page, it is called an impression. Impressions refer specifically to when an ad is displayed, not necessarily when it is clicked on. If you want to sell an ad on the homepage of your site, the prospective advertiser may want to know how many impressions they will get per month. Selling ads by impressions is another easy way to charge for advertising on your site. Some advertisers like to pay for their advertising this way because it gives them the chance to get more for their money if their ad is enticing enough. Smaller publishers sell impressions on a monthly basis, some on a weekly basis, and some on the actual number of impressions.

Acquisitions This is where affiliate sales and advertising overlap. Some advertisers only want to pay each time someone fills out a form or otherwise engages with the advertisement beyond a click. As you may recall, affiliate sales usually follow an actual transaction where money is exchanged. An acquisition in advertising is a softer transaction, like a visitor filling out a contact form or signing up for something. The point is that the advertiser gets more than just a click or an impression in exchange for their money.

Ad Networks One of the easiest ways to advertise on your site is to join an ad network. An ad network pairs advertisers with websites in their network. In order to display ads, all you have to do is set aside the right amount of space for the ads on your site and add the relevant web code. The ad network will often read the cookies of visitors to your site and serve ads that relate to them for maximum clickthrough. We often visit the websites of our link building competitors, so we see a lot of display ads from them as a result of this technology.

Joining the right ad networks will be essential to Karen the Healthy Food Blogger’s success. Karen’s website is perfect for advertising. Her subject matter, healthy cooking and recipes, will generate lots of interest and traffic. As Karen makes new pages, she’ll want to

45 make sure that the ads relate to the subjects of those pages and the interests of the page visitors. If she has a page on her site about gluten-free recipes, it would make sense to run advertisements selling gluten-free products on that page.

We recommended that Karen start by joining Google’s ad networks until she has enough information—and enough of a reputation—to sell ads on her own.

Google has an excellent network for both display ads and text ads. Their display ad network is called AdChoices, and their textual network is AdSense. Both networks are standalone programs that Google has set up for publishers so they can dedicate a portion of their websites to displaying Google ads that might interest their web visitors. If you’re interested in participating in either of these networks, all you have to do is set up an account and get going.

When you join, Google will read the web page that you want to place their ads on and will serve up text ads that are relevant to your site. When visitors click on those ads, Google shares the revenue with you on a pay-per-click basis. Every time someone clicks on the ad on your site, you get a piece of the action from the advertiser.

So when Karen joins AdChoices and AdSense, she might decide to place ads on her page about gluten- free recipes. Google will read this page and deliver up ads for gluten-free products in the spaces Karen has set aside. When her readers click on these ads, Karen makes a bit of money.

While the Google ad network provides easy ways to start making a little money from advertising, once you establish your traffi c and know who is visiting your site, you can start to search for a more specifi c or topical ad network for your site. There are hundreds of ad networks clamoring for your traffi c. There are trade shows dedicated to the ad network world. One of the largest of these shows is ad:tech.

The advantage to using an ad network is that you

46 chapter 3 - WEBSITE don’t have to build and maintain relationships with advertisers. Consequently, you pay for the convenience by sharing the ad revenue with the network.

SHOP TALKadvertising acronyms There are several acronyms you need to be familiar with in the world of advertising. These acronyms reflect different money-making strategies for both the advertiser and the publisher.

PPC - Pay Per Click CPC - Cost Per Click CPM - Cost Per Mille CPA - Cost Per Acquisition

PPC PPC stands for Pay Per Click. With PPC, advertisers only get charged when people click on their ads—not when they see it.

PPC is how Google makes its billion-plus dollars per week. Google is the most successful online advertiser in history.

Those who advertise on Google pay Google on a PPC basis. Anyone can go onto Google AdWords, buy keywords, write an ad, and place it in the Google system. These ads show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages) when someone searches for the keywords that the advertiser wants their text ad to be displayed for. Purchasable keywords vary in price from $0.15 to over $100 per click depending on the industry.

Apart from Google, Bing, and other major websites, there are few other websites that use a PPC system to charge their advertisers. You need an extremely robust system and a ton of traffic to make this work for you. Google and Bing have both the robust system and the traffic required to make hosting PPC advertising successful.

47 CPC Cost Per Click represents how much advertisers spend each time someone clicks one of their ads. If an advertiser selling dog beds wants to place an ad on a pet blogger’s site (like Randy the Pet Blogger’s), Randy might negotiate a CPC advertising basis with them. He might say that the CPC is $4.25. And at the end of the month, he’ll fi gure out how many times the ad was clicked on and give the advertiser a bill. CPC and PPC are basically the same in this regard.

CPC is also a way that a site that charges monthly for advertising (a simple plan for smaller publishers) can divide the monthly cost for the ad by the number of clicks. If Randy the Pet Blogger wants to charge a dog beds site $500 per month to have a skyscraper ad on his homepage and he gets 100 clicks on that ad, the CPC is $5. If the same ad gets only 50 clicks the next month then the CPC is $10. The term CPC is fl exible in that regard.

CPM Some of the bigger sites sell impressions instead of clicks. They use CPM, or Cost Per Mille. Don’t let the fact that “mille” resembles “million” fool you, though. It actually means 1,000 impressions. (“Mille” is Greek for 1,000.)

When an advertiser is part of the Google AdChoices network, they provide the number of impressions in their AdWords tool so they can get an idea of how effective their ad is. Publishers who sell CPM should give advertisers reports so they can look at how many times their ads were displayed compared to how many times they were clicked. That will give them their CPC for that advertising campaign.

CPA When an advertiser wants to buy more than just clicks, publishers can raise the price and sell CPA, or Cost Per Acquisition. The world of CPA is vast,

48 chapter 3 - WEBSITE but know that in a CPA system, advertisers can sell a better product at a higher price on their websites if they do it right. Karen the Healthy Food Blogger could contract with a healthy snack company to put an ad on her site for a coupon book. Instead of getting paid when someone clicks the ad, she’ll get paid when someone fills out the form for the coupon book.

Examples of Publishers Making Money from Advertising CNN.com is a major publisher that uses both display ads and text ads to generate revenue on their site. The most prominent display ads are on top, but there are ads all over the page. They even have a section labeled “Sponsored Links” that displays a set of five or so text ads that advertisers pay a big price for.

Thesmallthingsblog.com is run by a blogger who sells display ads on her site and actually has an advertising page, if you’d like to pay her monthly fee. She sells impressions on her site.

Ezinearticles.com is a media site that allows users to place their own articles for others to read and use. Ezine then uses Google’s AdWords system to read the article and place text ads in the middle of the article with the hopes that a reader will click them. Ezine uses display ads served up by many ad networks so that they don’t have to worry about finding and maintaining relationships with their advertisers.

49 3. PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS If you’ve got an extremely attractive product that people need month after month, then you are a prime candidate for the paid subscriptions and memberships revenue model. There are thousands of examples of paid subscription success stories online. One of the most obvious is Netfl ix.com. They have an online storehouse of video content that you can access for a low monthly price. Another example is ESPN Insider. ESPN has millions of pages of free sports content that you can access, but the more detailed articles and stats are stored behind a paywall that only ESPN Insider subscribers can access.

Most SEO agencies use a traffi c estimator and keyword planning tool called SEMRush. The tool and its valuable data can be accessed if you subscribe. Stockgumshoe.com is a site dedicated to stocks and investing. Like with ESPN, you can access a lot of free content, but their most valuable content is found in their “Stock Gumshoe Irregulars” newsletter. They even produce both a free and premium (paid) version of their newsletter.

The strategy that ESPN and Stockgumshoe.com are using is called the “freemium” system. They give a lot of free stuff away as a sample for their paid content to convince their prospects that subscribing will be worth it.

If you decide to use a paid subscription business model, be prepared to offer so much value to your subscribers that they’d be a fool not to join your program. There is so much free content online already that getting subscribers can be one of the most challenging ways to make money online. Some sites have harnessed the power of paid subscriptions and charge as little as $1/month for their program. The lower the cost, the lower the expectation.

The advantage to subscriptions is that you don’t have to start your month wondering how much you’ll sell. Your income is more predictable.

We believe that the paid subscription model would

50 chapter 3 - WEBSITE work well for Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach’s e-commerce site. Jennifer is in the driver’s seat with her product line because people are usually willing to spend money to make money. Her personal finance products will empower people to spend their money more wisely and actually earn money from their savings.

When we explained the paid subscription system to Jennifer, she immediately knew that it was the right path for her to follow. She said that she already maintained a list of places where a small investment could pay off quickly. She also scoured the web daily for bargains on vacations, clothing, and furniture that she could share in a weekly subscription newsletter.

She decided to start her paid subscription newsletter, and even came up with a name: “Jenny’s Jewels.”

We advised her that setting up a freemium system on her site was going to be the best way to get people interested in what she had to say. Establishing a free newsletter that shared her already great blog content but not the valuable tips a premium subscriber would get would be the first step in the process of attracting subscribers.

We also warned her that maintaining a valuable blog and paid newsletter was a serious undertaking. She said she was up to it.

4. LEAD GENERATION Edmunds.com is a highly trafficked car review media site. It’s so well-established that car commercials will often quote what Edmunds said about their cars. Their homepage asks what kind of car you want to research. When you get to the landing page for the car you chose, Edmunds gives you lots of information: an editorial review, an opportunity to “Build Your Own,” and options to contact a dealer, get a price quote, etc.

Every type of engagement with Edmunds is driving you to their contact landing page. They want you to completely fill out their information form. When they have captured your information, they sell that to an auto dealer.

51 Edmunds.com makes its money as a lead generation site. Their product is leads. Those leads are sold to ambitious car dealers.

Buyerzone.com is of the same ilk, but a little less dressed up. They ask what you want to buy and several more questions to help them get very specifi c information about who to sell your lead to. These questions help them get very specifi c information about exactly who to sell your lead to. It’s almost shameless.

Franchisedirect.com is another example of a lead generation site. The goal of their site is for you to defi ne what type of franchise business you want to get involved with, and then you fi ll out an exhaustive form for more information. The lead is then sold to that franchise and they follow up with you.

Many people ask why lead generation sites ask so many questions. Leads are sold based on their quality. The more pieces of information contained with the lead, the more expensive it is to the buyer.

Pageonepower.com is a lead generation site, too. Its entire purpose is to help prospective clients feel great about our business so they’ll fi ll out the contact form for more information. Unlike Edmunds.com, we don’t sell the leads we get. We work with them with the goal of converting them to clients.

The purpose of the majority of local websites is lead generation, and as we explored in the previous section, this makes them lead generation sites. These sites exist to help customers call them and turn from a prospect into a lead, and finally, into a paying customer.

As we mentioned before, Bill the Attorney didn’t know it initially, but he has a lead generation site. His law practice relies on his website to get phone calls from people seeking legal services when they’re going bankrupt, getting divorced, or trying to adopt. The power his website carries in helping his practice attract new business is huge.

52 chapter 3 - WEBSITE Bill can get leads from telephone calls and from people filling out his contact form. If Bill wanted to, he could gather all sorts of legal leads, not just leads related to his practice. He could, in turn, sell those leads and make another stream of income off of his website.

The thing to remember about lead generation is that for people to enter their personal information, they need to know two things:

1. You’re trustworthy

2. You can give them what they want

If you can do this, then you can gather and sell leads.

5. E-COMMERCE E-commerce is the most identifiable way to make money online. It’s simple: you sell stuff on your website. Because it’s simple enough that everyone can understand it, it’s the most oversaturated and DYK? competitive way to make money online.

A successful e-commerce Driving traffic to e-commerce websites can be very website has: challenging. There usually isn’t anything about an e-commerce website that visitors will find interesting other than the product pages themselves. Additionally, • UNIQUE PRODUCTS the proliferation of Amazon and other online mega- THAT FILL A UNIQUE retailers has taken the legs off of many smaller NICHE e-commerce sites. So finding unique strategies to get traffic to your e-commerce site is vital. • A SOLID, REALISTIC TRAFFIC PLAN We’re not against using e-commerce as a way to make money online; we’re just realistic about it. It’s a tough way to make money online. But it’s possible to do well with it if you can do it properly.

When we’re approached by someone who wants to publish an e-commerce site, we ask how they plan to get traffic. They all say basically the same things: the site is going to be cool, we’re getting a video that will go viral, or we’re way cheaper than Amazon.

53 These are not good plans. When considering e-commerce, you should always start with these four simple questions:

1. Who will buy my product?

2. Where else can they buy it?

3. Why would they buy it from me? (What is my unique selling proposition?)

4. How will I get traffi c to this site?

If you can run your e-commerce business plan through these questions, then you have a chance to be successful. If you can’t, you might want to rethink what you’re going to do to make money online.

For example, Daryl the Greeting Card Guy came to us with a plan to sell his greeting cards online. He calculated that he could profi t $8,000 a month if he could sell 2000 cards per month. We helped him by estimating that 1% of the visitors to his website will buy cards, so he’d need 200,000 unique visitors a month to sell 2,000 cards. That is nearly 8,000 unique visits a day, which is a lot of traffi c.

Because of this, we suggested that in addition to selling his cards online, Daryl could give his cards away as a downloadable fi le that people could print off for themselves in exchange for a working email address. People love free stuff, and his cards would get a lot of free distribution with that method.

Giving them away for free would drastically increase his conversion rates and also allow him to build a substantial email list. With that email list, he could share new cards, keep in touch with people who enjoy his work, sell advertising, and carefully place affi liate links in his email blasts. His long-term win could eventually be his email list, not his e-commerce plan.

As you can see, there are actually lots of things you can sell online. E-commerce is not just selling widgets like bike racks, iPhone cases, and handbags.

54 chapter 3 - WEBSITE E-commerce also includes information products like Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach’s, video content like what can be found on iTunes, and valuable information like what’s provided by our friends at Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow is a forum where software developers discuss their process and share information. It’s a very popular site in the software developer community. At first glance you might think that Stack Overflow is working for free, just helping out the developer community. But if you know where to look, you can see that their enormous list of developer names and contact information is stored in their member database. These developers can be advertised to and even browsed through via a simple e-commerce purchase by people looking to hire software developers. Stack Overflow sells access to their huge list of developers, a unique product.

Overstock.com is an incredibly successful e-commerce website that claims to sell everything at a steep discount. They did an incredibly expensive but successful push on television and radio years ago to drive traffic. It paid off, and they continue to advertise their discounted products through television and radio. Their unique products are “overstocked” products that they sell at a discount. Their key plan to get traffic was—and still is— to advertise through traditional media.

Christmas-kings.com sells an information product. Their site is a classic e-commerce single sales page. Their target market is anyone who is unskilled and looking to work for themselves by starting a Christmas light installation business. When you arrive at the end of their page, you will be greeted by an enticing “Buy Now” button. They offer their product through several channels. One of them is Clickbank.com. Because they’re on Clickbank, they have a lot of other people getting them traffic on an affiliate basis. They have a unique product targeted at a good market with a great plan to get traffic.

55 when considering e-commerce, you should always start “with these simple questions:

1. Who will buy my product? 2. Where else can they buy it? 3. Why would they buy it from me? 4. How will I get traffi c to this site?

56 chapter 3 - WEBSITE CATCHING UP WITH OUR WTC MARKETERS: HOW THEY PLAN TO MAKE MONEY WITH THEIR WEBSITES

Daryl, the greeting card guy

Daryl has created some cool greeting cards. He’s on a roll with making new ones and feels that his new business is going to be big. His initial idea was simply to sell his greeting cards. After he and his wife spoke with us about his plan, they decided to expand their concept of how to make money with their site. Instead of just e-commerce, they will collect email addresses and offer advertising and affi liate links in their email blasts. They also like the concept of giving away older cards for free as printable downloads in exchange for an email address to build their email list.

Because Daryl is emotionally connected to his newer cards, he wants to maintain their integrity as cards that only his fans can purchase.

Daryl’s wife is very relieved that they won’t have to rely solely on the sale of his cards. They went from simply selling cards on an e-commerce basis to making money with advertising and affi liate sales as well.

57 Jennifer, the personal fi nance coach

Jennifer is on fi re. She has spent the last few months writing and revising her fi nancial coaching e-books, making CDs, and developing her workbook. She feels that the landing page on her guru’s website isn’t good enough for her to do what she needs to do, so she’s looking into making her own website. We agreed with her and started the process of helping her do that.

Jennifer is excited to sell her products on her own website and can see the value in building an email list to sell her new products, announce upcoming events, and carefully place affi liate links. She also feels that her paid newsletter, “Jenny’s Jewels,” is going to be successful.

Jennifer has discovered that her initial plan to make money via e-commerce with her personal fi nancial products is only the beginning. Affi liate sales, monthly subscriptions, and e-commerce jumpstart her plans to earn money from her new venture. This gives her even more motivation to achieve new goals in her second career. She couldn’t be more excited.

Bill, the attorney

Bill went into his offi ce after Hunter told him that his site sucked and looked out the window for a while. He asked himself how he got into this situation.

After Bill called us, we were met with a hostile and diffi cult situation at his offi ce in our fi rst meeting.

Once we explained the lead generation site concept to Bill, he started to relax. He really liked the idea of building his site to attract more than just bankruptcy and family law leads, and is even considering the plan to build an email list so he can place affi liate links in email blasts.

Hunter followed us out to the parking lot after the meeting and gave us high fi ves. “Thanks guys, I

58 chapter 3 - WEBSITE needed that help.” We told him that building traffi c to Bill’s site is going to be a big job, and that he shouldn’t thank us yet.

He laughed. “At least he doesn’t hate me anymore.”

Randy, the pet blogger

Randy initially had no idea how to make money off of his media site. His friend Jerry’s suggestion that he sell pet products never sat right with him, so he never did anything with it.

When we last met Randy he was fresh off a diffi cult day at the offi ce. He had been trying to sell quite a few prospects the appropriate pet insurance policies and felt again that his boss was threatening to fi re the “lowest performer.”

Randy sounded depressed when we spoke with him about his plans. After going through the fi ve ways to make money online, his head was spinning. We had to meet with him the following week to go over it all again. He started to understand what we were saying.

His new plan was to build a page on his site called “Randy’s Recommendations,” where he would place Amazon affi liate links to his favorite pet products. He knew exactly which companies he’d promote. He was starting to blog more frequently, and his traffi c was building each time a new post went up. Although his traffi c levels weren’t very high, we convinced him to start placing ads on his site. That way, his site would look like it receives traffi c. When his traffi c levels increase, he will already be making money with it. He felt good about starting to advertise on his site with Google AdChoices.

Once we solidifi ed that Randy would make money with affi liate sales and advertising, we asked how he got his leads for his pet insurance sales.

59 He mentioned that they purchased the leads, and they were paying their source a lot of money for them. We found this interesting, and asked him how much they were paying.

Randy leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingertips together. He thought he understood what we were saying.

“I should work on my blog to get people to sign up for pet insurance.”

We replied: “Either that, or you can make your site a lead generation site that sells those leads to companies like the one you work for.”

Randy feels that insuring your pet is the best way to assure that they will get the long-term care they might need. So he changed the plan for his website.

Randy went from being depressed about his future to feeling confi dent that he could turn a new leaf and make positive changes in his life. He was still skeptical about how it all would work out, but now he had a plan he could get behind: generating and selling pet insurance leads to make money on his media site.

Karen, the healthy food blogger

Karen initially thought that she could sell recipes on her website. When we asked her why people would buy her recipes, her only answer was, “Well, they’re very good.” The conversation ended badly because we had ruined her idea to sell recipes. We’ve found that people struggle to abandon ideas about how to make money online.

Before our conversation ended, we told Karen about the fi ve ways to make money online and scheduled a follow-up meeting for the next week.

The night following our conversation, Karen couldn’t sleep. She brainstormed instead, and ended up

60 chapter 3 - WEBSITE deciding that rather than trying to sell her recipes, she could hire someone to develop a mobile app that would provide her menus and shopping lists to her users. Making money with subscriptions was a better business model for her media site than selling recipes, and we loved her concept.

We convinced Karen that it would be a good idea to place advertisements on her site. Building an email list of fans and advertising to them was also an easy sell. She didn’t completely understand the concept of affi liate sales, but after another explanation, she understood what we meant. She has very particular opinions about which cooking appliances and tools work best. We suggested that she start a page on her site that would list her favorite products with affi liate links. She understood that concept and immediately had ideas about how to do it.

She had another idea, too. She could host cooking webinars through her site and invite people in the food industry to talk about healthy cooking. She said, “How about a webinar, like healthy cooking with Bertolli Olive Oil? I could sell webinars and invite my subscribers to attend for free. That would give advertisers a forum to talk about their product in an in-depth way.”

If she positioned it right, she could sell her services to host the webinar and invite her fans. A brilliant advertising concept. We loved it.

Javier, the musician

Javier abandoned the concept of selling his music- related information products online. He chose to give them away as a free download in exchange for a good email address. His terms and conditions page stated that once they accepted the download, they would be receiving promotional emails. This did not stop anyone from downloading his products.

61 He immediately placed ads on his site and started getting clicks. The whole world had opened up to Javier. He would be selling ads and placing affi liate links on his website and email blasts. Now he wants even more traffi c.

As you can see, just knowing the fi ve ways to make money online is empowering. As you begin to formulate your plans to jump into the online gold rush, you can deliberately choose one of the three types of sites and then select which of fi ve ways to make money online you want to implement on your site. Now let’s talk about the seven in our WTC 3/5/7.

62 chapter 3 - WEBSITE seven goals for your website.

Your website is the heart of everything you do online. A good website will be well-designed and have a great logo, tagline, and domain, too. But all of those pieces are secondary to one thing: your site needs a goal. Once you’ve determined what kind of site you have and how you intend to make money with it, you can begin to set goals for how you will make money with that site. The goals we outline below are the seven in the WTC 3/5/7.

Amateurs build sites that are cool to see and cool to use. The novelty of being online and making something they can be proud of is their primary goal. In this case, people look for a design that they like, one that reflects who they are and who they’re trying to be. The way the site looks is the most important decision to them. Many websites are built on this premise.

Professional web marketers see it differently. The first thing they do is decide what type of site they are building and how they’ll make money on their site. Next, they define the goals they want their web visitors to achieve so that they can make money.

Bill the Attorney’s site is a classic example of a website that was designed with looks in mind instead of a goal. His current website was built by a national company that builds websites for lawyers. The site was inexpensive and easy to set up. Bill chose the design based on his sensibilities. The site was clean, neat, and organized. He could go into the site and change the text and the pictures, but after he entered the text about his practice the first time, he felt satisfied and has never changed it. He liked his site because he thought that it looked professional. It actually looks dated, which is why Hunter told him that he needed a new site.

63 Bill was almost unwilling to meet with us. He had already chosen a website. We explained that when people design websites, the fi rst thing that they think about is how it looks. They agonize about the colors, the layout, and how it “feels.” We said that a more sophisticated way to approach a website is to ask what the website is supposed to do. How will my website fulfi ll a certain task? How is this website going to make money? How can I fulfi ll those goals?

Bill seemed intrigued by what we were saying. It had never occurred to him that his website was supposed to do something.

Karen the Healthy Food Blogger, on the other hand, has never liked the free WordPress template that she’s been using. It has worked for her, but she really wants a new one. We agreed that her template needs some work, but when we made a list of the goals for her website, the template she had in her head wouldn’t accommodate any of her goals. We had to go back to the drawing board with her.

A website can fulfi ll one or more of these seven goals:

1. Get a phone call

2. Get contact information via contact form

3. Sell a product

4. Sign up for an editorial newsletter

5. Sign up for email updates on specials/ promotions/offers

6. Sign up for a membership or subscription

7. Attain affi liate clickthrough

Get a Phone Call Getting a phone call is a very black-and-white goal: either you receive a phone call, or you don’t. Bill the Attorney is once again an easy example here. We

64 chapter 3 - WEBSITE helped him decide that his site is trying to generate leads for his practice. He told us that he would prefer to have his leads call him on the telephone. Therefore, his website’s primary goal is to encourage phone calls from prospective clients. We all agreed that every element on his website should convince people to pick up the phone and call him.

Bill’s site suffers from a few problems. The firm he purchased his site from uses stock photography that is very impersonal. The photos are professional- looking, but because they don’t mean anything to his practice, they act as a bit of a deterrent when it comes to getting the phone to ring. People want to find someone they trust, and they know the images aren’t his. Sometimes people get to his website and feel like it’s a fake.

Additionally, his phone number is only found on the “Contact Us” page of his site, which is kind of hard to find. The phone number on the site rings at the reception desk, and it is their regular house number. We immediately suggest that he get a tracking number to identify how many phone calls his site generates.

Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach wants phone calls, too. The most expensive product on her site is her personal coaching package. She sells a five-hour phone coaching package for $2500. Instead of having a “Buy it Now” button on that landing page, she has a button that says “Call Me.” When we clicked on that button, it took us to her contact page.

Her contact page includes her phone number, but her phone never rings. When we saw that landing page on her site, we knew that we could help encourage people to call her with some adjustments to the page and some testing.

Many of you will want your site to achieve this goal. We will cover the best practices for the fulfillment of these goals in the “Conversion” section of WTC.

Get Contact Information Via Contact Form We rarely get phone calls at Page One Power. Our

65 clients are all over the world, so the time zone differences prevent us from receiving phone calls during business hours. Therefore, the primary goal of our website is to have our prospects fi ll out a contact form so we can contact them at a reasonable hour.

Although Bill prefers to get phone calls, he also wants to start selling leads to other attorneys. If someone with an interest in criminal defense were to call him today, he would have to take their phone number down and give it to another attorney. He wants his site to focus on bankruptcy and family law, and on the pages that talk about those things, he plans to highlight his phone number. We are also building pages for many other parts of the law. We plan to put contact forms on those pages so his receptionist won’t have to sort out the referral calls from the calls that are for Bill and his associates.

These pages will have to be set up a little differently than the bankruptcy and family law pages. In order to persuade visitors to fi ll out these forms, we’re going to have to use best practices and do some testing. He will also need an organized way to collect these leads and keep track of them.

Randy the Pet Blogger’s primary money-making method is to sell leads to pet insurance companies. He really wants to make this work, so we’ll have to strategize the best approaches to encourage visitors to fi ll out his contact form with the appropriate amount of information.

Sell a Product Selling a product online is the most complex goal you can set out to achieve. Taking a visitor through the process of browsing your site, to your shopping cart, and fi nally, to the actual transaction, is a big goal. The act of entering a credit card number on a website is when the consumer is at their most vulnerable state online. Your site needs to impart trustworthiness, professionalism, and ease of use to be successful at achieving this goal.

Daryl the Greeting Card Guy wants to sell his greeting

66 chapter 3 - WEBSITE cards on his website. He has priced them at $5 and has had his web developer tie his website into an excellent e-commerce shopping cart platform that enables him not to worry about the logistics of making a sale. What Daryl struggles with is how to maximize the conversion of a visitor to his greeting card landing page from a shopper to a buyer. We’ll talk more about this in the “Conversion” section of this book.

Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach wants to sell her CD sets and other information products. Her guru taught her a simple system that involves including a video on the landing page for each product that persuades people to buy. Jennifer actually points to the “Buy Now” buttons on her pages and uses “Scribble Doodles” to humanize the look of the page. It’s cool stuff. We really like her guru’s concepts because they’re goal-oriented.

Sign up for an Editorial Newsletter Every website should have this goal. Email marketing is such a great way to make money and to keep your clients engaged that it shouldn’t be ignored.

All of our WTC Web Marketers need a high-quality ^^^ form, and each needs a compelling reason to sell “Scribble Doodle” example to humanize the look of a their newsletter. We’ll talk more specifically about website selling a product. how email marketing can be used to gain traffic in the “Traffic” section of WTC.

Sign up for Email Updates on Specials/Promotions/Offers This goal is slightly different from the goal of newsletter signups. Often, a newsletter delivers editorial content. When your visitors sign up for email updates on special offers, it gives you the green light to market openly to them. CAN-SPAM Act laws are stringent about how you can use your email list. Getting your visitors to subscribe to the right kind of list is a critical part of what you will want to do with your email campaigns.

Javier, Jennifer, Daryl, Randy, and Karen have aspirations to place both advertising and affiliate links in their email marketing.

67 Sign up for a Membership or Subscription This is a goal that Jennifer the Finance Coach and Karen the Healthy Food Blogger have decided that they’d like to achieve. Both of them have a worthwhile product to offer on a subscription basis. Jennifer has her paid newsletter and Karen her menu and shopping list.

To sell these subscriptions, both the landing pages and the links to them need to be compelling.

Affi liate Clickthrough Nothing happens in affi liate sales unless someone clicks the affi liate link. Your goal is fulfi lled when your visitors click your affi liate links. The success of the sale is the other site’s responsibility. If our WTC Web Marketers want to fi nd success with affi liate clickthrough, they’ll need to think carefully about the placement and anchor text of their links. Anchor text is the actual text that the user clicks on that leads them from one page to the next. Anchor text is key to affi liate clickthrough. Anchor text is

the actual text a user clicks You can set your goals once you establish the on that leads them from one^^^ methods that you’ll use to make money with your page to the next. site. Use these goals as the guidepost for your web design and content strategy. They’ll give you the direction you need.

It’s also a good idea to prioritize your goals. Once your goals are prioritized, it will be easy to design your site in a way that encourages their fulfi llment.

68 chapter 3 - WEBSITE putting it all together.

Before we start talking with clients about how we can help them with their website, we like to identify where people land in the 3/5/7 by asking:

1. What type of site do you have?

2. How does your site make money?

3. What are your site’s goals?

These parameters will give you clarity and insight into what you’re doing. Knowing exactly what your money-earning strategy is can help you organize your thoughts and break down the individual sections of your website. It is important to set clear money- making goals, especially as we launch into the next section on building a website. Knowing what you’re trying to accomplish with your site is the guidepost for the design and build of your site. Each of the 3/5/7 parameters reveals what you are doing and why.

69 OUR WTC MARKETERS’ WEBSITES

How do our WTC Web Marketers apply the 3/5/7? Let’s fi nd out!

Daryl, the greeting card guy:

Makes money by:

1. E-Commerce - selling his greeting cards

2. Affi liate sales through his email blasts

3. Advertising in his email blasts

By fulfi lling these goals on his site:

• Sell his greeting cards

• Get people to sign up for his newsletter

• Get affi liate clickthrough

He’ll run an e-commerce website.

70 chapter 3 - WEBSITE Jennifer, the fi nance coach:

Makes money by:

1. E-commerce - selling CDs, workbooks, and personal coaching

2. Paid subscriptions - “Jenny’s Jewels,” her newsletter

3. Affi liate sales

4. Advertising

By fulfi lling these goals on her site:

• Sell her information products

• Sell her subscription newsletter

• Get affi liate clickthrough

• Get a phone call

She does this by setting up and maintaining an e-commerce website.

71 Bill, the attorney:

Makes money by:

1. Lead generation - getting people to call and email his offi ce

2. Lead generation - selling leads to other attorneys

By fulfi lling these goals on his site:

• Get phone calls

• Have people fi ll out the contact forms on his “other” service pages

• Get people to join his newsletter

Bill’s site is a lead generation site.

72 chapter 3 - WEBSITE Randy, the pet blogger:

Makes money by:

1. Lead generation - pet insurance leads

2. Advertising on his site and his email list

3. Affi liate sales from his site and email list

By fulfi lling these goals on his site:

• Get his visitors to fi ll out his contact form for information about pet insurance

• Help visitors sign up for his newsletter

• Get affi liate clickthrough

He’ll maintain a media website to accomplish these goals.

73 Karen, the food blogger:

Makes money by:

1. Paid subscription - selling her subscription menu and shopping list

2. Advertising on her site and in emails

3. Affi liate sales from her emails and site

By fulfi lling these goals on her site:

• Get people to subscribe to her menu/shopping list service

• Get subscribers to her newsletter

• Get affi liate clickthrough

Karen will do this with a healthy cooking media site.

Javier, the musician:

Makes money by:

1. Affi liate sales

2. Advertising

By fulfi lling these goals on his site:

• Get signups for his newsletter

• Get affi liate clickthrough

Javier will run a media site.

74 chapter 3 - WEBSITE building a website.

If you know what type of site you’re going to build, the ways it will earn money, and the specific goals of your site, you’re already ahead of the game. You’re working like a professional. When you finish this section, you’ll know more about successfully building a website than almost anyone. First, you’ll learn the 12 steps to building a website. These twelve powerful steps will empower you to avoid costly mistakes and build the website you really want.

Next, we’ll cover the seven elements of web design. These concepts will give you a toolbelt that few know about. You’ll see websites in a whole new way after learning these elements. You’ll also be able to assemble a successful website in a fraction of the time it may have taken before.

We’re also going to address other important things to consider when building your website, like your content strategy, blogging, and analytics, in preparation for learning about how to drive traffic to your website.

To a first-timer, website building may seem pretty straightforward, even easy. To a second-time website builder, the process may seem scary and dreadful because they know that building a website is complex and challenging.

If you’re going to make money online, building your website is going to take time, effort, and money. Doing a poor job will result in a poor website. We want you to know how to build a site correctly, but before we get involved in the nitty-gritty of building a website, it’s important that we talk about the basics of how the web works.

75 how the web works.

It’s shocking to us when we meet people trying to make money online who don’t know the rudimentary elements of their industry. There are hardly college courses on this material, so most people just go with the little they know along with educated guesses. This usually leads to unfavorable results and the painful learning/unlearning process that we referred to in the introduction.

Things don’t have to be this way, however. This section outlines the basic elements of making a living online. When you fi nish with this section, you should be able to talk with other web entrepreneurs about making money online.

Your Website is a File of Papers Your website is made up of many different web pages, like a folder full of papers. Each web page on your website is a different page in the folder. That folder sits in a virtual fi ling cabinet called a server. Your server belongs to your web host, and their job is to maintain the fi ling cabinet (server) where your website lives and to make sure that it is always connected to the internet. A hosting company, like GoDaddy, Hostgator, or Bluehost, is basically like a storage facility full of fi ling cabinets, and your website is one of the many folders in their fi ling cabinets.

When someone (a visitor) wants to see your website, they type your URL (Universal Resource Locator) into their web browser and their internet service provider (ISP) starts a search for your folder. Their ISP asks authoritative sources where your fi le is. When they fi nd your fi le, your host allows their browser to download a copy of your web page, like a piece of paper from your folder, so they can view it. The browser’s job is to read the fi le and display it so you can get value from the pages.

76 chapter 3 - WEBSITE Your website is basically a folder of pages in a filing cabinet. People download the pages of your site and view them in their browser.

Your Domain Name Your website might be named: www.karenshealthycooking.com but its real name is 152.125.654.255. That string of digits is called an IP address. When you type karenshealthycooking.com into your browser, it starts looking for the location on the web or, the IP address (152.125.654.255), of the site. Like zip codes and house numbers, IP addresses are how everything on the web is organized.

Cookies When you download a web page from a server, your browser may save pieces of information that will enhance your experience when you visit the page the next time. For instance, you may go to CNN.com and click through the website to a page where you download a picture. When you go back to that web page, the link to that picture would change in some way to indicate that you’ve already clicked it. Or when you visit a website and type in your username and password, your browser will record that information so you don’t have to re-enter it over and over again.

In advertising, many ad networks will read the cookies in the visitor’s browser to see what types of web pages they’ve visited, and then they’ll serve up ads that correspond to that visitor’s specific interests. This is the reason that when you visit a website about a trip to Jamaica, you see ads for trips to Jamaica for a while.

The Keys to Your Website You wouldn’t buy a house and not get the keys, but there are millions of people who “own” websites and have absolutely no access to them. Because you’re trying to make money with your website, there are some important things that you need to have in your possession.

77 Domain Name Your domain is one of the most important keys to your website. When you go to GoDaddy and purchase your domain name, you need to make sure that you purchase that name with your own account, not your friend’s, partner’s, mother’s, or anyone else’s. Your domain name is the key to the front door of your house. If you need access to it, you really need it. We’ve seen situations where a domain name has expired and an entire website goes down for a long time because the owner of the website didn’t buy their own domain name and they had to fi nd out how to get access to the domain name account. Domain name registrars, like GoDaddy, are very careful about who can get access to domain names. Get your own account and buy your own domain name.

Host Username and Password Like your domain name, not having your own hosting account could potentially spell disaster. We had a client who was using a friend’s hosting account for his website to save a little money, and he and his friend had a falling out. Then the host account was deleted “ and all the fi les, including his website, were gone forever. Get your own hosting account, pay the bill, and keep the username and password on fi le.

Website Files We’ve seen servers crash, hosting services go offl ine, websites get deleted from servers, and many other server/hosting disasters. It’s important that you download your entire site at least once a month and save the fi les. When your site inevitably goes down, you’ll be glad that you did.

If you don’t want the hassle of doing it yourself, there are online website backup service companies that will download your site and secure it for you.

Because your goal is to create a sustainable online business, you want to make sure that you are familiar with these concepts before you build your website.

78 chapter 3 - WEBSITE to a first-timer, website building may seem pretty straightforward, even easy. “to a second-time website builder, the process may seem scary and dreadful...

79 like building a house: 12 STEPS TO BUILDING A WEBSITE

A professional web marketer knows that building a website is just as diffi cult and complex as building a house.

When you build a house, you need architects, builders, and designers. An architect ensures that the house plans will support the goals of the occupants and that everything will fi t. They make blueprints that the builder uses to lay fl oor joists, install sinks, lighting, sheetrock, and doors. Once the architect’s drawings are completed, the builder builds the structure. Finally, the designer comes in and hangs drapes, installs furniture, and makes it inviting.

Just like building a building, when you build a website, you’ll need an architect, a designer, and a developer.

Information Architect When a professional web marketer builds a site, they start with the architecture of the site. They know how the site will make money and what goals need to be achieved on the site. Then, they develop their content strategy; they decide what they’re saying and what content will deliver the message. They produce the content after this. We’ll discuss content strategy a little later in this section.

Next, they start to strategize how to get traffi c to the site. They do that so they can be sure to add all the elements that they’ll need to fulfi ll their traffi c plan. A site’s traffi c plan will also infl uence its content strategy. Information architects will also do keyword research to discover what keywords need to be used on the different pages for SEO and content clarifi cation purposes.

80 chapter 3 - WEBSITE Once their traffic plan is organized, the architect will figure out which pages they need for their site. They will contextualize these pages on a flowchart to figure out how the pages will be connected together. This flowchart is called a site architecture plan. This plan is the first step in seeing what your site will be like, as it shows which pages go where.

After the site architecture plan is completed, information architects make wireframes. A wireframe is a black-and-white drawing of the elements and content on a web page. It basically tells you what goes where on a given page. A wireframe doesn’t show what the finished page will look like, only where everything will go and exactly what it will say. Creating a wireframe allows you to test the content before the designer steps in. If it looks and sounds right in a wireframe, then a good designer can make it exceptional.

And if you discover that it isn’t good before the web page is designed, you can feel good about the amount of time and hassle you’ve saved, as making wireframes is cheaper than hiring designers and web developers.

Some people scoff at the idea of doing a wireframe for each page of their site. Some sites are thousands of pages deep. But we know that every website usually only has a few types of pages. Many wireframes and designs apply to multiple pages.

Web Designer A web designer takes your black-and-white wireframes and makes them look good. They’ll use colors, fonts, graphics, and other elements to “put lipstick” on your wireframes. Their finished product is a set of digital images that looks like your finished website. They won’t be functional because they’re only pictures of what your website will look like when it’s actually online.

A great web designer will know the goals of your website and will design your site to highlight those goals. It’s important to keep the goals in mind and not get swept up in aesthetics. Remember, your website exists to achieve certain goals so that you can earn money.

81 Web Developer These images then go to the web developer. A web developer is a highly skilled computer programmer who can take your web design and turn it into working web pages. The web developer will take your web designer’s images and code them so they will work using computer code such as HTML, PHP, Ajax, or JavaScript.

A web developer will ensure that the pages function and look exactly like the designer and the information architect intended. A great web developer will actually enhance the pages to function beautifully, too. They’ll know techniques that will make the user’s experience of good web designs great.

When the developer is done, you’ll have a bundle of computer fi les that need to be uploaded to your server. Upon installation, your site will go live, and you can begin to execute your traffi c plan.

SITE MAP

Home

Services About Contact An example of a simple wireframe site map. A black ^^^ and white drawing of the Sign-up elements and content on each page of a website.

82 chapter 3 - WEBSITE In summary, a professional follows these 12 steps to build a website:

1. Decide how the site will make money

2. Define conversion goals for the site

3. Develop a content strategy

4. Develop content

5. Strategize the traffic plan

6. Do keyword research

7. Make a site architecture plan

8. Build wireframes for the pages

9. Design the pages

10. Develop the site

11. Push the site live

12. Activate the traffic plan << THIS IS CLEARLY MUCH MORE THAN WHAT AN AMATEUR WILL DO! MOST PEOPLE UNDERESTIMATE THE MAGNITUDE OF GETTING A SITE ONLINE AND MAKING MONEY WITH IT. DON’T LET THAT HAPPEN TO YOU AS YOU CONTINUE ON YOUR JOURNEY OF MAKING A LIVING FROM THE WEB. IF YOU TAKE THESE WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT STEPS SERIOUSLY, YOU’LL BE GOOD TO GO.

83 the seven website elements.

If you’ve ever sat down to build a website, you know how daunting it can be just to fi gure out what to put on the homepage. It seems like there are millions of options, so how do you decide what to put on your site?

In the process of building hundreds of websites, we devised a simple system for making a wireframe. It’s our beloved seven-piece system—The Seven Elements of Web Design.

We look at building a wireframe using our seven- piece website elements system like making a pizza in a commercial pizza kitchen. In a commercial pizza kitchen, you can make any kind of pizza you want using the different ingredients, but there are a limited number of ingredients available. Like making a pizza, if you take these seven website ingredients and put them together, you can make any kind of website you want. All websites are basically built with these seven elements, which will help you to develop wireframes that serve your website’s goals:

1. The W’s - Who, What, Why

2. Aces

3. Featured Content

4. Proof

5. CTA (call-to-action)

6. Quick Links

7. Content

84 chapter 3 - WEBSITE the W’S Any first-time visitor to your site will ask these basic questions:

1. Who are you?

2. What do you do?

3. Why do you do what you do?

4. What makes you different?

Most websites answer one, two, or all of these questions. Who you are and what you do should be very obvious. If you can’t answer those questions easily, you should seriously rethink what you’re doing online. Most of us know who we are and what we do. This information should be easily identified and prominently placed on your website.

For example, “Randy is a blogger who writes about animal rights because he’s loved animals for as long as he can remember.” Randy could expand on this description, but this simple explanation tells you a lot. We know that Randy’s a blogger who writes about animal rights because he loves animals. Simple. We know who he is and what he does.

We call this important element the W’s: Who-What- Why. You don’t have to answer all these questions, just the ones that make sense for you to answer. When someone lands on Daryl’s greeting card site, they will know at a glance that he makes greeting cards. He doesn’t need to say, “I make funny greeting cards.”

85 But his site visitors will want to know who he is and why he makes his cards.

What about Jennifer? Jennifer is a fi nancial coach who loves to help people get their fi nancial life in order. We know instantly who she is and why she does it. Jennifer could also mention that she provides informational products such as CDs, webinars, and a paid newsletter to answer the question of what she does. What makes her different? People will want to know because she is not the only personal fi nance coach on the web.

Karen is a food blogger who shares what she knows about recipes and how to cook healthy food for her son who has allergies. In just a few words, we know who she is, what she does, and why she does it.

Yes, mentioning the W’s may seem pedantic, but believe us when we say that it’s shocking how many people fail to deliver this basic information about themselves on their website. They suffer because of it. It’s easy to forget that fi rst-time visitors have never met you and know nothing about your W’s.

We suggest that this vital information (the W’s) be provided on the homepage. There, you should link to more detailed informational pages about the answers to your W’s.

86 chapter 3 - WEBSITE aces UP FRONT

When Jon was in the portrait business, there was a mantra he used when posing groups of people: aces up front. He’d place the most attractive people in the front of the group. In web design, you need to determine the “ace” that you can showcase.

Your ace is usually one of these three things:

1. People

2. Product

3. Process

On your homepage, the “hero” image is the fi rst picture a user sees when they land on your site. Make sure your hero image is your ace. ^^^

Let your imagery be your hero. The hero image is the fi rst picture a user sees when coming to your site.

87 For example, one time we reviewed a local sign maker’s site while doing some live site reviews at a web marketing conference. He featured a long promotional video that highlighted his process as his primary hero image on his homepage. When we explored his site, we saw that he made gorgeous signs for businesses. We suggested that he replace the video with high-quality photos of his signs. These signs were his ace, and should be highlighted accordingly.

Karen the Healthy Food Blogger’s ace is also her product: her recipes. She works hard to take great photos of her food. They’re the most interesting thing she has to offer. Her recipes are the most compelling part of her website, her ace.

Daryl’s ace is his cards. His cards will pull people into his site.

Javier the Musician’s ace is the forum that brings people onto his site and keeps them coming back. To feature his forum, Javier made an image of the most interesting topics that are discussed on the forum. That image, along with a link that says “Explore the Forum,” focuses a good portion of his traffi c to the most interesting part of his site.

Bill the Attorney is well-known in his community and his associate attorneys are incredibly gifted individuals. He and his associates are the aces of their business. He needs to feature himself and his associate attorneys on the site. Bill doesn’t like to have his photo taken, so we had an illustration made of them all with a three-line description next to their picture.

Whatever your ace is, feature it prominently on the homepage of your site.

88 chapter 3 - WEBSITE featured CONTENT

Magazine covers are designed to attract attention and to highlight all of the exciting things contained inside. A magazine editor finds the best content in the magazine and then places teaser headlines on the cover to encourage readers to open it up. Your website should use the same strategy to fulfill your goals and to keep visitors on your site.

Your website needs to have content that’s compelling, interesting, and unique. This content is the reason your website exists. It’s the reason people visit. Javier the Musician’s website has a great forum, and he’s going to showcase that in the ace section of his homepage. He also has an incredibly lively podcast. We noticed that to find his podcast, you had to browse around the site. He also has great educational products that his visitors would be happy to find. In short, his website is loaded with great content that needs to be featured throughout his site.

When we start a new web design project, we browse every page of the existing site and find the most interesting and useful content. Then we feature it throughout the site with a short paragraph or image. We usually feature it on the homepage in addition to other parts of the site as necessary.

We recommended that Javier make a few graphics that summarize the podcast and the educational products and place them on his homepage and on the sidebar of his forum. This strategy also serves the greater purpose of his website, his goals. Javier’s goal is to get

89 people to sign up for his email list. Both his podcast and educational products require a valid email address to access them. But if people don’t know or aren’t reminded about these awesome pieces of his website, he’ll have a much more diffi cult time fulfi lling his goals and ultimately, making money.

You can feature content on your site with a short paragraph, a single line, or an image linking to the page featuring the content. However you feature your content, it’s important to give enough details to induce a click.

Magazines have perfected the concept of featured content. They “tease” people into opening their magazine by featuring different articles or pictures on the front cover. Carry this concept over to your web design. Identifying your best content and fi nding ways to feature it is a powerful way to encourage engagement on your site.

An excellent example of featured content follows. ^^^ As you can see, CNN features content with noticeable headlines, “teaser” paragraphs, and images. They use “FULL STORY” as their CTA to draw attention to the fact that you’re only getting bits and pieces from the lead.

90 chapter 3 - WEBSITE quick LINKS

Sometimes you may want to highlight an important page of your site but don’t want to dedicate much space to it. Quick links are the way to accomplish this. Quick links are subtle reminders that something valuable is quickly accessible.

Quick links differ from featured content because they don’t involve lots of accompanying copy or elaborate graphics. They’re usually just a link with simple anchor text or a small picture with text.

Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach might put a small box on her sidebar that lists all her different educational/coaching products in a succinct way just to keep them readily available across her site.

Because Bill the Attorney specializes in bankruptcy and family law, he might want to place a simple graphic on his homepage with those two options for people to click on in addition to a main navigation piece.

Randy the Pet Blogger keeps track of the most popular blog posts on his site and might benefit from having a box in his sidebar that lists them so new visitors can immediately engage with something else he’s written. Karen the Healthy Food Blogger should have links to related recipes on her recipe landing pages so her visitors can explore more of her website. These quick links will keep people engaged with her site longer and reinforce her overall goals.

91 proo

When people visit your site, they generally will ask themselves two questions:

1. Does this site have what I want?

2. Can I trust it?

If you’ve done a good job with the W’s on your site and you feature an ace that highlights your products, people, or process, you have provided enough evidence to answer the fi rst question. Your fi rst-time visitor should know in just a few seconds if you provide what they are looking for.

Answering the second question is more diffi cult, but it’s vital because the internet is full of scams. If you don’t establish that your site is trustworthy, you’ll suffer the consequences, especially as a new site.

People will learn to trust you by the professionalism your site exudes through its design, copywriting, and reputable third-party validation. That third-party validation is proof that you can deliver what you say you can, and therefore demonstrate you’re trustworthy.

Your site should include pieces of proof throughout its pages. Sometimes, the pieces of proof on your site can be the difference between success and failure.

Proof doesn’t have to be obnoxious and overt, but it should be identifi able and prominent. There are several different ways you can prove yourself to new visitors. Several are listed as follows.

92 chapter 3 - WEBSITE Types of proof:

1. Testimonials

2. Satisfied customers

3. Groups you belong to

4. Associations

5. Awards

6. Badges

7. Validation

8. Certification

9. Acknowledgements

10. Media mentions

11. Favorable reviews

After you’ve identified the types of proof that apply to your site, it’s time to place them throughout your site. Don’t just dedicate all your proof to the homepage. Sprinkle it throughout your site to remind your visitors … that they can trust you. BEST VALUE Javier the Musician has received several emails from forum users expressing how much they’ve learned from his information products. He needs to use those testimonials, particularly on the landing pages where BADGE people enter their email addresses. He can also use them on his featured content pieces. He could place LOREM.COM … a good testimonial with a call to action (CTA) to learn more about his educational products.

Karen joined a prominent online healthy cooking group ^^^ Example badge. Badges and is a major contributor to their website. She’s even indicate to users that you been asked to speak at their annual convention. Karen are an active part of your industry community and needs to get a badge that identifies her status in that promote trust in your site. group and place it on her site.

93 Bill belongs to several law associations in his region. He even served as the president of one of these associations for a year. He needs to showcase that fact.

Randy belongs to several animal rights groups. He needs to showcase their logos on his site.

Jennifer has taken multiple courses in fi nancial planning and has earned many certifi cates. She needs to display them. We suggested that she place the most impressive one on her homepage and the rest on her “About Me” page. Also, if Jennifer can get a quote from a respected fi nancial institution or another fi nancial guru, it should be placed very prominently on her site.

Daryl’s greeting cards were selected to be featured in a graphic design magazine. That’s great validation that should be showcased on his site.

We display customer testimonials on our Page One Power homepage. When an extremely infl uential link builder sent a recommendation to us, we placed it prominently on the homepage—you can’t miss it. His endorsement instantly lets our visitors know that they can trust us. call-to-action CTA CTA stands for call-to-action. CTAs are the reason your web pages exist. They are the text and images that encourage users to click and fulfi ll your goals. Your CTAs should make sense, be prominently placed, and have action verbs contained in the text.

94 chapter 3 - WEBSITE CTAs can simply say “Call for your free consultation,” or they can be a complex funnel of steps that leads a customer through your buying process. Whatever they are, you could argue that they’re probably one of the most important elements on your website.

Types of CTAs:

1. Images

2. Text

3. Buttons LISTEN images A clickable image can be a powerful way to compel action on your site. Photographs and illustrations are just some of the ways you can add interest to your CTA. Javier has a CTA prompting his visitors to listen to his podcast on the sidebar of his website. This CTA is a cool illustration of a microphone with the title of his podcast next to it that says, “Listen to the Podcast.”

text Sometimes the most powerful CTAs are just plain old text. Google uses text CTAs in their SERPs. Text is TO THE PODCAST convenient because you can easily change it, and it can fi t almost anywhere on your web pages. ^^^ Javier’s graphic CTA, a Bill the Attorney’s site has the words “Call Now, Let’s clickable illustration, for the Talk” displayed in the top right corner. sidebar of his site. buttons Buttons beg to be clicked. The most common button on the web reads “Buy Now,” and though ubiquitous, these buttons are still a powerful call to action. Anything you can place on a button will evoke a visitor’s interest.

95 OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS TO CONSIDER IN ORDER TO AMPLIFY YOUR CTA use color Smart use of color will make your text, pictures, or buttons more attractive. If you ever wonder if your CTAs are easily identifi able, just show your web page to someone who hasn’t seen it before for fi ve seconds and ask if they saw your CTA. Sometimes a subtle change in color can make a big difference. be smart While smart use of color helps, don’t make your CTAs hot pink and jump all over the page; be smart, subtle, and crafty. If you ever want to see what the most successful internet marketers are doing with their CTAs, go to eBay or Amazon. They test their CTAs over and over again to ensure the highest clickthrough rate possible.

You should experiment with different images, text, locations, colors, and sizes to fulfi ll your goals. If your goal is to gain subscribers to your email blasts, then your CTA should be placed in an important place at the top right corner (TRC) of your web page. Or if your goal is to sell your CD sets, like Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach, your CTA might be to “Listen to a Sample” and then to “Buy Now!” on the CD landing page. conten All the elements we’ve described above will help you to promote clickthrough and fulfi ll the goals of your site. They promise the visitor that they’ll get what they want if they click here, buy now, or download.

96 chapter 3 - WEBSITE However, your success will be directly proportional to the quality of the content you place on your site. If a restaurant is in an awesome location, has a great atmosphere, and incredible service but the food is bad, no one will go back. Your website’s content is the “main dish” of your website that will keep people coming back.

Your content can be textual articles, videos, pictures, or audio. Whatever it is, placing great content throughout your site is the reason people will stay and come again.

97 CONTENT STRATEGY

Websites are nothing more than communication platforms designed to deliver information digitally. The content that you create for your website is the reason your visitors come, stay, and come back again. Needless to say, what you say and how you say it will impact your website’s success. “Content is king” is an eternal truth of the online world.

Developing your content strategy is a process that fi rst requires you to identify your message and then plan the ideal way to deliver this message on your site. identifying your message.

Your website’s content needs to be the expression of your message, so before you craft any content, you need to know what your message is.

What are you trying to say? What are you trying to tell the world? These are the fi rst questions we ask prospective clients. The closer you can get to the essence of your message, the more successful your content strategy will be.

Clear, message-driven content helps your visitors quickly decipher what you hope to communicate. We believe that most websites fail to attract and keep traffi c because they fail to deliver the kind of focused information that makes even brief periods of time spent on their sites valuable. If visitors don’t fi nd your site valuable, you won’t attract traffi c. Traffi c is the currency of your website. Without it, you can’t operate.

We’ve also found that it helps to make a list of your basic beliefs to help you organize your message. Once you’ve distilled your message down to a list of specifi c

98 chapter 3 - WEBSITE principles, you’ve defined what you want to say, and therefore have a resource that you can refer back to when producing content.

We discovered the power of distilling your message down to a list of basic beliefs when we were developing our second Page One Power website. Once we sat down and wrote out our 11 link building beliefs, it was easy to rewrite all the pages of our website to reflect those beliefs. We knew exactly what we were trying to say to the world about our business and why we do what we do.

This was an amazing breakthrough for our content strategy. Since then, our link building clients have hired us because their beliefs resonate with our beliefs about link building. Our clients can read about our beliefs and how we do business on all of the pages of our website. This revolutionized our website, and consequently, our business.

Later, we discovered Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, and agreed with his thesis that people do business with a company not because of what they produce, but because of why they do things the way they do. He uses Apple Inc., as an example. He says that Apple fans are so loyal because they believe in the concept of challenging the status quo, and they believe that Apple challenges the status quo, too.

We can see this example in play with Randy the Pet Blogger. His message is that animals deserve to be respected and cared for. His dedicated readers also believe this, so we suggested to him that he write a page that details his core beliefs. This page became so popular that Randy made a video that showcases his 12 unique beliefs. In turn, his fans shared this on social media. Just the act of writing out his beliefs helped his readers feel more closely connected to him and his principles.

We believe that everyone operates from a set of principles in every aspect of their lives, but in order to make them meaningful, you need to identify them. Talk with a friend and answer the questions below.

99 Use these questions to help distill your website’s message:

1. Tell me about yourself and how you got into this business.

2. Tell me the history of your company.

3. What do you do exactly?

4. Why do you do what you do?

5. What makes you unique in your industry?

6. What are your guiding business principles?

7. What about your process is unique?

Look for patterns in what you are saying. These patterns—the things you say over and over again—could be considered your guiding principles. Write them down.

Refi ne your list of beliefs and expand them to full sentences.

Now you can write pages of content and make videos, podcasts, and graphics that express your message. You don’t have to put a page on your website that states your beliefs like we did. Just generating the list and crafting your web content to comply with your beliefs will make your content strategy so much easier to execute.

This is certainly the case for Karen the Healthy Food Blogger. Her “Food Manifesto,” a 14-point document that details exactly what she believes, is one of the most popular pages on her site. Her principles have dictated what kinds of recipes and content Karen posts on her blog. We have always believed that principles beget practice. So has Karen.

Your content is the lynchpin of your entire website. But the development of your message and content will never be fully complete. It’s one of the burdens a web marketer bears.

100 chapter 3 - WEBSITE usability.

Usability has become the next big thing in web marketing. Usability is the quality of making your website easy and attractive to use— more usable. There are usability experts and usability services that will assess your website and give recommendations that will refine your website for maximum performance. But we’ve found that adhering to a basic set of best practices provides a good start. Below is a basic list of usability best practices.

Top 5 Usability Guidelines:

Top Right Corner (TRC) The Top Right Corner is the most valuable real estate on any web page. Eye-tracking tests show that it’s one of the first places people look on a website. Consider carefully what you’ll do with that space.

Tell the User What You Want Them to Do If you ever get the opportunity to hear a usability expert do site reviews, you’ll notice that they always ask the same question first: “What do you want me to do now that I’m on your page?”

We have used this guidance in many different web design projects to help us design a wireframe for a page. If you have a page that doesn’t have a clear call to action, you’re missing out on a simple but effective bit of usability expertise.

When you finish a wireframe, ask yourself: “What do I want the user to do on this page? Is it readily apparent?”

Clear CTA Along with telling the user what you’d like them to do on a web page, you need to ensure that your call to action is clearly marked and clearly described. Subtly placing the words “put in cart” on your web page is not nearly as powerful as clearly marking a brightly colored button with the words “Buy Now.”

101 Links Look Like Links This principle of usability is losing its popularity, but it’s still useful to make links on your site look like links. What do links look like? The most effective links are text links that are blue and underlined. Every deviation from that standard is slightly less effective. Don’t make your user hunt around for how to navigate your web page. Make your links look like links.

Local Navigation Web navigation is an important part of your website. Builders of complex websites really have to think about how their user is going to get to the content. Don’t let your web developer decide how things link together. Develop a site architecture plan and you’ll more easily see errors in your navigation plan.

There are many other widely accepted usability best practices to be found online. Just knowing that they exist should tell you that you need to pay attention to usability on your site.

102 chapter 3 - WEBSITE blogging.

Blogging can be a powerful tool. It can be the lifeblood of your site, keeping it fresh and alive. When you maintain an active blog on your site, it makes your site seem much more lively and interesting. But if you can’t blog at least once a month, it’s best not to blog at all. When your “latest post” is over six months old, it may look like you’ve abandoned your site. We’ve found that the following tips will help keep your blog fresh. We will discuss blogging in greater depth in the “Traffic” section.

Make Categories If you’ve tried to maintain a blog, you understand that it can be difficult to keep up with the seemingly endless amount of work that it generates. We’ve found that limiting your blog topics to a series of categories can make blogging feel more manageable.

Also, a good interval for blogging is about once a week. If you blog more than that, it’s likely that you’ll feel overwhelmed. If you blog less than that, your blog can get stale.

When we decided to publish one blog post a week and assign each week a different category, it made blogging much easier. We chose to blog about industry news, interviews, link building tips, and internet marketing tips. We’ve found that categories highlighting featured work, success stories, and problem-solving blog posts are also helpful.

We’ve discovered that personal stories, rants, introspective soliloquies, and other self-indulgent blog posts aren’t well received on a commercial- focused blog. Keep it professional and on point. Identifying categories will help.

Editorial Calendar Once you’ve determined your blog categories you can further simplify your blogging by making an editorial calendar. In one sitting, you could determine your

103 categories and write out three possible titles for each. If you do this, you’ll have three months’ worth of blog post titles and know when they’ll be published.

Who’s Your Audience Remember that your goal with the blog is to attract readership and traffi c, and to convert that traffi c through one of your goals. Make sure that your blog posts are written for your customers and prospective customers.

104 chapter 3 - WEBSITE website analytics.

If you’re serious about your website, you need analytics. Analytics is a tool for measuring web traffic. It reveals how many people visit your site, where they came from, which pages they’re viewing, how long they’re on each page, and where they live.

Having this data is so valuable that it’s shocking to us that few people actually have analytics installed on their website.

Analytics is free Google Analytics is a free service. There are other free analytics tools and some more in-depth paid versions, but for most people, Google Analytics is plenty.

To install Google Analytics, you need to set up a Google account and log into the Analytics website (www.google.com/analytics) to get your customized analytics codes. Then, you’ll need a web developer to install these custom lines of computer code on each page of your website. Once that’s completed, you can start to get a valuable insider’s look into all of this precious data.

SHOP TALKindustry terms There are some industry terms that you’ll need to know to deploy and use analytics:

Hit: A hit is usually thought of as a person visiting your website. It is actually when someone requests something from your server. Sometimes a web page has several elements that are requested when someone wants to view one of your web pages, so

105 counting hits is an extremely misleading method to assess your web traffi c.

Session/Visit: A session/visit is a visitor’s sequence of clicks and series of page requests.

Unique Visitors: An individual visitor creates their own session, and these sessions are referred to as “unique.” Web marketers love “uniques” because it measures the actual number of people that are visiting the website.

New Visitor: Brand new traffi c. Analytics knows that a visitor is new by the IP address of their computer or mobile device. There are also returning visitors that your analytics recognize by their IP addresses.

Page Views: A request to see an individual page is a page view. A visitor could browse around your website in a session and accumulate many page views.

Time on Site: This is the amount of time a visitor spends on your site. Analytics also measures how long they visit an individual page.

Referrers: Your web visitors come from somewhere on the web. The “referrers” stat helps you know where they came from. There are visitors from search engines, other websites, emails, social media websites, and those who directly type your web address into their browsers.

Bounce Rate: This is a percentage of your visitors who do not go past one page on your site. If they came onto your site and left without browsing around, they bounced.

106 chapter 3 - WEBSITE Goals One of the most useful things to do with analytics is to set goals. Google Analytics allows you to define goals like “sign up for a newsletter,” “sell a product,” “click an affiliate link,” and so forth. You can set up these goals and then track how often you are reaching your goals and where your goals fell apart.

Interpreting Analytics The data that analytics provides doesn’t tell you the story of what’s happening on your website. It’s up to you to provide the narrative as to why your page views are up or the bounce rate is down. Installing analytics on your site is the first step in gaining control over what your site is doing and trying to understand why.

It’s also important to know that web analytics data isn’t 100% accurate. There are glitches in the system and other problems. It’s estimated that 30% of the raw analytics data is just plain wrong. Take your analytics with of grain of salt.

OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN IT COMES TO DESIGNING YOUR WEBSITE

You Have Five Seconds To Imprint Your Message Five seconds is the average amount of time a first time web visitor will give you before they bounce.

Once you’ve designed a new web page, try this: close your eyes, reopen them, and count to five. Look for a realistic reason to stay on your web page. We’ve found this system works really well as a reality check on the power your web page has to hold a user. If a web page can hold its visitor, it’s “sticky.” Web publishers are always trying to increase “stickiness.”

Always Have A “Links” Page To Share And Swap Links You’ve no doubt seen pages on websites that are labeled “Friends,” “Links We Like,” “Partners,” “Resources,” etc. Those pages are effective because they lend a community feel to your website. People don’t like to feel trapped on a website. Open up your arms a little and reference other websites on your site.

107 CONCLUSION.

In this section, we’ve given you a solid platform and framework to make informed decisions about how you’ll make money online.

First, we learned the valuable WTC 3/5/7:

1. The three different kinds of websites

2. The fi ve ways to make money online

3. The seven goals for your website

We learned that once professionals have their 3/5/7 in place, professionals start to build their websites. They plan the type of site, how it’ll make money, and what its goals will be before they start building. Also, professionals don’t build by imitating the look and feel of other sites they like. Professionals use the 3/5/7 to inform:

1. Their site architecture plan

2. The wireframes for their pages

3. The site’s design

4. The site’s development

PROFESSIONALS DESIGN WEBSITES WITH THE SEVEN WEBSITE ELEMENTS IN MIND. THEY DEVELOP CONTENT STRATEGIES, CONSIDER USABILITY GUIDELINES, AND INSTALL ANALYTICS ON THEIR SITE SO THEY CAN MAKE SURE THAT THEIR SITES ARE ACTUALLY FULFILLING THE GOALS THEY DEFINED AT THE BEGINNING OF THEIR WEBSITE-BUILDING PROCESS.

OF COURSE, BUILDING A GREAT WEBSITE WON’T AMOUNT TO ANYTHING UNLESS YOU DEVELOP WAYS TO ATTRACT TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE.

108 chapter 3 - WEBSITE 109 4.

TRAFFIC

DON’T LET YOUR WEBSITE GET LONELY OUT THERE

110 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC IMAGINE THAT YOU WERE PLANNING TO OPEN A CLOTHING STORE. IF THIS WERE SO, YOU WOULD WANT TO SPEND YOUR TIME FINDING THE RIGHT CLOTHING TO SELL. YOU WOULD ALSO PERFECT THE DÉCOR, LIGHTING, YOUR SIGN, AND YOUR LOGO BEFORE OPENING YOUR DOORS. IMAGINE EVERYTHING IS JUST AS YOU DREAMED IT WOULD BE; WOULDN’T YOU FEEL AWFUL IF NO ONE EVER VISITED YOUR STORE?

The amount of work required to build your website is almost equal to that of opening a retail store and sadly, most websites get little to no traffic. But unlike stores that get drive-by traffic, your website sits alone on its own dead-end street. No one can accidentally drive by.

It can get real lonely out there on the web. If you’ve built a website that adds value to humanity because it has original, useful information or products that will improve peoples lives, you have the start of a good website. If you don’t offer what your target audience wants or needs, you will struggle because ultimately, your best traffic generator will always be return or referred visitors.

Nevertheless, even great websites need to constantly spark interest and garner new traffic. You need to convince people that driving out to your site will be worth the trip. This section is written to help you do that. online methods only.

As we built Page One Power, we studied every option available to us to attract traffic to our lead generation site. We started to identify the different channels that we could use and what we could do to maximize each one. Some of the channels we discovered aren’t located online. For instance, one of the methods we pursued was speaking. We spoke at every live SEO and marketing event we could find. Speaking became a powerful catalyst for growing our business.

111 More and more television commercials advertise websites every year. We mentioned Overstock.com earlier in the book. Their main traffi c generator is television and radio advertising, and this works for them. There are thousands of offl ine methods that will help you to get traffi c and grow your business.

None of them will be discussed in this book.

Instead, we’re going to focus on the nine online methods that we identifi ed and used to get our website thousands of visitors each month. Remember though, that as you build your own unique marketing plan, you should use every available marketing channel at your disposal, online or offl ine. It will take every possible idea to get your website the traffi c it needs so you can earn a living. Make no mistake, getting traffi c is the most challenging aspect of running a website.

Nine ways to get traffi c:

1. Content Marketing

2. Blogging

3. Social Media Marketing

4. Email Marketing

5. SEO

6. PPC

7. Display Ads

8. Partnerships

9. Affi liate Marketing

112 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC content marketing.

We mentioned this in the “Website” section, but this wisdom is worth repeating: your website needs to include valuable, unique content if it’s going to attract the kind of visitors that come back. If you want your website to be an asset to your visitor’s time on the web, it must contain the information that they want or need. Without it, you’ll struggle to gain sustainable traffic.

Content marketing is the practice of preparing and distributing content that helps prospective and existing clients interact with your company in a non- intrusive, non-advertising way. Content marketing is an editorial conduit that meets your clients where and when they need you.

Content marketing has existed since 1895, when John Deere started publishing their Furrow magazine. To this day, Furrow continues to share information about the latest farming techniques. Of course, John Deere’s equipment helped the farmers execute these new techniques, but the point of the magazine was to help farmers be more efficient at their jobs. Later, JELL-O made a lot of headway with content marketing by publishing recipe books and mailing them out for free. The recipes all included JELL-O as an ingredient.

Content marketing differs from advertising because it’s editorial in nature. The content is meant to help people, not just to gain their interest with advertising. Content marketing is designed to deliver education and information. Advertising is designed to pique the consumer’s interest in a product or service. Both are useful and can help your site gain traffic. We will talk more about advertising in the PPC and Display Ads sections of “Traffic.”

The term “content marketing” covers a range of editorial, content-related ways to promote your site. It includes when Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach writes an article about how to make sure your checking account never gets down to $0. When the Huffington

113 Post publishes her article and people love what it has to say, they click through to her website. That article drives traffi c to her site.

Content marketing is also when Karen the Healthy Food Blogger makes a video that answers a question about how to cook rice that doesn’t clump. She can place this video on YouTube for people to fi nd. Karen could develop an entire series of cooking videos to host on YouTube. As people get comfortable with her information and delivery, they might investigate her website.

Content marketing is among the most diffi cult methods for gaining traffi c because it requires a concerted and consistent effort. It’s not easy to create something that people will care about, but it can be very valuable if done correctly.

On-Site Content Marketing On-site content marketing involves making DYK? educational, useful content for your own website. For example, if Bill the Attorney were to build a helpful Content Marketing questionnaire for potential bankruptcy clients, this breaks down into two piece of content marketing would exist on his site. It would become a valuable part of his site because it types: would compel those who need it to interact with it, and he might get leads because of it. At the very least, ON-SITE it would make his site more interesting and useful. OFF-SITE Karen the Healthy Food Blogger, Randy the Pet Blogger, and Javier the Musician operate media websites, so the main selling point of their websites is their free editorial content. You could say that the more engaging their on-site content, the more traffi c they’ll get because of it. For media sites, the concept of on- site content marketing is vital. Adding useful features, articles, how-to’s, videos, and other great pieces of content could literally make or break their success.

If you’re operating a media site, take a long look at your site and ask yourself, “Would I like to visit my own site? And if I did, would I want to stick around?”

114 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC It’s interesting to consider that before the web, very few people considered the business option of starting a magazine. But since the web began, that’s essentially what millions of people have done without realizing it. What makes a magazine good? Do you want to read magazines that don’t have great content?

When we spoke with Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach about her content marketing strategy, we suggested that she write a long list of questions that everyone asks her and then build an article library on her site titled “Jennifer’s Answers.” When people get comfortable with her answers and how she delivers them, they might be tempted to investigate her further. This piece of content marketing on her site could be very good for traffic because when she uses SEO principles on those articles, they’ll be found on the search engines, which will direct traffic to her site.

Your blog content is a large part of your on-site content marketing strategy. Making useful blog posts and promoting them through your email list and social media is content marketing. We will cover blogging, email marketing, and social media marketing in the next sections of Traffic.

Off-Site Content Marketing Working with other websites to attract traffic to your own is a smart thing to do. The most challenging part of having a website on a day-to-day basis is publishing high-quality content that people want to share and use. If you can help lift the burden of another website by providing them with something that their visitors will like, your outreach email and subsequent content will be a welcome part of their day.

When we launched our off-site content marketing strategy at Page One Power, we first made a list of all the websites that we wanted to be published on. Then, we started to write articles and outreach to these sites. When we started, it seemed like getting published on these sites was nearly impossible. It took six months of communication, but we are now regularly published on all of them. A great deal of our qualified traffic—visitors

115 looking for a website like ours— comes from these SEO- industry media sites. They love our consistent, high- quality content, and we love the traffi c and engagement that has resulted from these affi liations.

A strategy like this could also work for Javier the Musician. He could form monthly contributing author relationships with live music media websites. He could supply articles that talk about the latest and greatest ways to succeed as a live band. As people become curious about what else Javier has to offer, he would get clicks from these articles.

Articles aren’t the only thing you can publish on another website, though. Graphics, videos, podcasts, and other forms of media are always welcome on a high-quality media site.

Getting Started with Off-Site Marketing Make a list of any and all websites that you would like to publish your work. Remember that you’ll probably want to make a list of media websites in your own industry. Lead generation and e-commerce websites usually don’t respond to this method. Next, email the webmasters and submit article titles. Call them if you can fi nd a phone number. Tweet, Facebook, or send them messages via LinkedIn. If you are persistent and polite, you’ll fi nd success with this strategy. It might take a few months like it did for us, but it’s worth the effort.

Obviously, you should save your best content for your own website. Focus on your on-site content fi rst. Once you’ve established a body of on-site content, you can work on your off-site content marketing. None of this is easy—it may take several tries to get it right—but content marketing is one of the most vital ways to get qualifi ed traffi c to your site.

116 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC blogging.

Blogging is a vital piece of any web marketing plan, but few people seem to understand how to blog to attract traffic.

To start with, blogging provides a stream of content for your social media and email marketing campaigns. A large part of your social media output is based on content that you share with the world. Your new content will appear on your blog and then you will share it with your social media networks. If you choose to build your email list and send out frequent emails, your blog will house the content that you share.

You want people to click on your links on social media sites and your emails. You want them to see the value in what you offer and stick around for more. This is especially true if you consistently provide great content that your social media friends and email list will want to share.

Your great blog content also gives people a reason to subscribe to your email updates. If you run a lead generation or e-commerce site, your blog will be one of the few reasons people will give you their email address for email marketing. If the content is good, you stand a chance at getting new subscribers. If not, you’ll really struggle.

Your blog gives you an outlet for news related to your site or your industry. As your website develops, you’ll need to announce updates, specials, and new products. Your blog is the most logical place to host this information. These updates will create another reason for people to subscribe.

A great blog compels visitors to return to your site. If someone has already been to your site and has “seen it all,” your blog is what they’ll come back to if you regularly update it with fresh, interesting content. We recently saw the power of a blog in a test we conducted for our client who operates a local event center. We completed their new website and set up a

117 usability test where we watched several people using their new site. One young woman, a prime prospective customer for our client, got on the site and the fi rst thing she clicked on was the blog. She wanted to see what the event center was doing lately. She wanted to see what some of the events looked like in an informal setting like the blog, not just what events looked like in the promotional photography on their site.

This experience taught us that people are smart and savvy about where to look for what they’re interested in knowing. Sadly, the blog on this site was only fi lled with generic article titles like “Company Party Season,” “A Winter Wedding Venue,” and “A Great Place to Have Parties.” She clicked off immediately.

It’s surprising to us how often website owners don’t use their blogs like they should. When used correctly, blogging can be one of your most useful traffi c generators. We’ve found that there are fi ve steps to blog success:

1. Select Categories

2. Develop Blog Calendar

3. Promote Blog

4. Adjust

5. Keep Going

Select Categories Too often, starting a blog can look like this: open interface, think about what to write, and stare blankly at the screen for hours until inspiration strikes. Maybe. Trust us; you will be more productive if you establish a set of categories that you regularly publish to. Think of a newspaper and its columns and regular sections, like sports and the Sunday funny papers. These categories are established at a newspaper so they can plan ahead for what they need. The same should go for your blog. Also, when you establish your categories, you can be more creative about your posts because the big

118 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC decision of what this blog post will relate to has already been made.

SOME CATEGORY OPTIONS:

INTERVIEWS --- We’re sure there are people in your industry who are worth interviewing. Interviewing experts and placing that interview on your blog is an easy way to get the interviewee to mention your blog to their friends and to build traffic. We’ve interviewed multitudes of industry experts and competitors on our Page One Power blog. Interviews are a brilliant way to generate high-quality content quickly.

TOP 10 --- People love lists. Making top-10 lists and blogging about them will ensure that people will click on the content and at the very least browse it. Which title would you rather click on: “Link Building Success Stories” or “10 Link Building Success Stories”? In general, if the reader knows how long it will take to read your article (or how many list items lie ahead), they will be more likely to invest the time to read it.

HOW-TO --- “How-to” is among the most searched topics online. What do people want to know about your industry? If you consistently post informative how-to articles, you’ll see visits from the search engines and social media.

Karen the Healthy Food Blogger should produce how- to articles and videos, like “How to Cook a Duck” or “How to Make Barbecue Sauce.”

GO NEGATIVE --- It’s natural for people to write blog posts that highlight the favorable parts of their product or industry. Try the opposite. Which article title is more attractive: “The Best Children’s Book of 2014” or “The Worst Children’s Book of 2014”?

119 CONTROVERSY --- Picking a controversial topic and writing about your point-of-view is a surefi re way to get traffi c. In our experience, we’ve discovered that posting a clear disclaimer about what’s to come in the opening statement will keep a misunderstood or negative response to a minimum. There’s no doubt people love controversy.

This type of post is readily shared on social media. If Daryl wanted to take advantage of the traffi c that can be generated by controversy, he could write a blog post titled “The Worst Famous Art.”

RANTS AND RAVES --- If your industry has its ups and downs, you can playfully rant about it on your blog. You can do the same with good things that happen in your industry. Rave about clients you love, new products, legislation that’s been passed, a new development in your industry— anything worth raving or ranting about.

Rants would be a suitable category for both Randy the Pet Blogger’s and Karen the Healthy Food Blogger’s blogs. Earlier in the book, we stated that personal rants are not suitable for your website’s blog, but topical rants could help you gain impassioned followers who agree with your position. Randy could rant about the state of animal rights in the United States. Karen could rant about the Standard American Diet or other topics related to healthy eating.

REVIEWS --- We had a client who sold mattresses. He set up a section that reviewed accessories to his mattresses: sheets, pillows, bed frames, nightstands, sleep aids, pajamas, etc., on his blog. He did this because his viewers appreciated his honest reviews. Every time he wrote a review he looked for fi ve sites that would be interested in that review and emailed them. This practice got him inbound links from all sorts of suppliers and e-commerce sites.

120 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC SPECIALS --- Everyone can offer a special: 2 for 1, lower fees today, ½ off, etc. If you’re running a restaurant, an e-commerce website, a lead generation site, or a media site, your blog can offer a special at a regular interval. People will subscribe for this.

GIVEAWAYS --- We’ve worked with clients who host giveaways on their blog. These blogs give away something an exchange of an email address, a tweet, a Facebook like, and other kinds of engagement. If you have a product that has high profitability, won’t perish, and is easy to ship, you have a wonderful opportunity to host frequent giveaways. As your giveaway promotion gains popularity, you can invite other websites to host your giveaway on their blog and then you can send your traffic to their site. It’s a great way to do cross- promotions.

For example, Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach’s blog could host a monthly giveaway of her most popular CD set. Or Karen the Healthy Food Blogger could host kitchen tool giveaways on her blog—we’re sure that reputable brands would give her products in exchange for her endorsement. In turn, people will return to her blog to see what she’s giving away and to enter for a chance to build the kitchen of their dreams piece by piece for free!

CONTESTS --- If you want your audience to engage with your brand with more than just an email, tweet, or Facebook like, you could hold a contest. Have your readers write a story or share photos relevant to your website. We had a client who was selling expensive liquor, and they held a contest that let bartenders share their most interesting stories. The winner received a free party at their bar complete with several bottles of liquor. The contest attracted hundreds of bartenders and the site got tons of traffic.

121 NEWS --- What’s going on with your site, your industry, your product line, your family? What’s new? Setting up a news category is an easy win for quick content. Randy chose to blog about animal rights’ news on Mondays to start the week with ease.

WEEKLY ROUNDUP --- Another successful piece of our Page One Power blog has been our weekly link building roundup. We carefully select a handful of the best new articles related to our industry and highlight them for our subscribers to enjoy. We like it because we don’t have to write all the content, and we get to include other people in the blog post. We receive more shares, likes, emails, and thanks from this weekly post than all the other posts we produce combined.

SUCCESS STORIES --- Every business has positive stories that their customers would love to hear. When you have a success story that would inspire others, document that story and share it on your blog.

Karen’s blog would certainly be amplified with success stories of other parents feeding their families healthy food.

HOT TIPS --- Everyone loves hot tips, insider information, little- known facts, or basically anything useful that you have in your knowledge base. Don’t take for granted all the little things you know that others might fi nd useful.

If she’s ever short on time, Jennifer could write a quick “Money Tips” blog post that simply offers a tiny bit of fi nancial advice. This wouldn’t take very much time, but it would be useful to her readers.

GUEST BLOGGERS --- This is one of our favorite categories. Make a list of websites that your business is related to and start to build a relationship with them via email or social media. Ask them to be a guest blogger on your website. Invite them to share their expertise. After you

122 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC publish it, they’ll share it on their social networks, and their readers will go to your site. Conversely, you should offer to place blog posts on other blogs.

Be sure to make a page on your site titled “Write for Us | Your Topic” because there are bloggers who scour the web looking for websites to publish their articles.

Randy the Pet Blogger intends to run either an interview or a post from a guest blogger every Friday. Because his site deals with both pet care and animal rights, he can host a wide range of bloggers from either or both of these niches. This will give Randy a day off from writing and help him to form relationships with others in his fi eld.

INFOGRAPHICS --- Infographics are graphic, visual representations of Below is an example of an infographic from Maersk information. They are fun to look at and can quickly displaying the ideals behind communicate a large amount of complex information. its Triple-E ship. Source:

Maersk Line Flickr. Creative Infographics are challenging to make, but if you can Commons.^^^ consistently generate high-quality infographics, they can really build your traffi c.

PODCASTS --- Developing your own podcast is fun, engaging, and can be very powerful. One advantage to a podcast is that your users can subscribe to it and listen to it as they drive, as opposed to a written article where they have to dedicate a few minutes to reading it. Our podcast, “The Backlink Show,” is our most popular piece of content. It gets shared across the SEO world each month. Both Javier the Musician and Randy intend to drive traffi c to their blogs by producing a podcast.

123 CUSTOM CARTOONS --- Cartoons strips are easy to make. People love them, and they’re highly sharable, no matter your niche. For example, Hitreach.co.uk, an SEO and web design company in the UK, produces a comic called “Digital Rockstars” that deals with the happenings of a typical digital agency. These comic strips are popular and widely shared within our industry.

MEMES --- Memes are simple, quick, and fun to share. There are meme-generating websites that will help you make fresh memes. Memes can be great content to share via social media. And again, they can work for almost any industry.

VIDEOS --- Videos can be a great way to share information. Once, we had a client who sold RVs. He hired a videographer to make in-depth videos about the new RVs his store received each month. They would fi lm in-depth walkthroughs of these expensive vehicles. This effort attracted customers from all over the nation. People were looking for fresh video content like his.

124 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC Karen the Healthy Food Blogger recently tested a clever video idea. She made new recipes and then had her children taste test the food. The results were hilarious, and these videos got shared across the web.

We had a DJ client who made videos at his best gigs and then he shared them on his blog and across social networks. The attendees of the events shared the videos. They became a valuable piece of his online marketing strategy because prospective clients got exposed to his work. As visitors came to his site, they could watch the videos of the events he hosted. Digital Rockstars is a comic produced by Hitreach.co.uk BLOG CONTENT CATEGORY SELECTOR GUIDE --- that deals with the typical happenings of a digital There are many other kinds of content that you can agency. The strip lends feature on your blog when you are establishing your

itself well to sharing industry wide. ^^^ blog content categories. This list is meant to spark your imagination. Please realize that your blog can host lots of content besides your standard written articles. Establishing a set of reliable categories takes you to the next step in blogging success: making a blog calendar.

Develop a Blog Calendar Like having specific categories, developing a blog calendar will help you organize and produce your blog. It’s well-established that deadlines motivate people to complete projects, and knowing what and when you’re supposed to be publishing serves as that deadline.

We’ve found that brainstorming the next three months in an hour-long meeting is much more effective than having an open plan for each day’s blog content. Additionally, publishing major pieces of content, like infographics and videos, takes a lot more coordination and planning than a regular blog post.

We always recommend establishing several categories and a reasonable blog calendar to keep your blog moving. For instance, Randy the Pet Blogger plans to blog in the following categories: news roundups, how-to’s, rants, podcasts, and interviews/guest posts. His blog calendar for a month might look like the following.

125 mon tues wed thurs fri NEWS HOW-TO RANTS PODCASTS INTERVIEW/ ROUNDUP GUESTPOST

3 4 5 6 7

Roundup How-to Why I Podcast with Guest Post from Of previous Feed your dog Support Humane Marianne Post Weeks news A vegetarian PETA Society Director of The Dog Blog diet Jane Johnson

10 11 12 13 14

Roundup How-to Don’t eat the Podcast: Cat Interview with Of previous Cope with a pet’s Fois Gras! Communication Organic farmer Weeks news Terminal illness Techniques Brett Bason

17 18 19 20 21

Roundup How-to Where NOT to Podcast: The Guest Post Of previous Stand up for Shop if you care Environmental Weeks news Animal rights in About animals Impact of CAFOs Your city

24 25 26 27 28

Roundup How-to The danger of Podcast: How-to Guest Post Of previous Care for your Giving pets Winterize your Weeks news Pets over the As gifts Outdoor Rabbit Holidays Hutch

^^^ Above is an example blog calendar that could be set for Randy, the Pet Blogger.

126 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC Promote Your Blog Having a blog that no one reads can start to feel awful. To get your blog going, you’ll need to promote it. We recommend three methods for promoting your blog in addition to sending the content to your email list:

1. Social Media

2. PPC

3. Outreach

SOCIAL MEDIA Social media is a powerful tool that you can use to push your content across the web. Using it correctly can help you attract new visitors to your site. When you publish a piece of content, regardless of what it is, share it on your social networks. Also, ask others to share your content. If you’ve had a piece of content go viral in the social space, you will understand what we mean when we discuss the power of social media. We’re going to address the specifics of social media as a means of getting traffic in the next section, but it’s important to recognize that your blog content should be promoted through your social networks.

PPC Pay per click is a useful tool for getting traffic to your unique blog content because you can purchase specific keywords in Google, Facebook, and other places to bring targeted traffic to specific blog posts. One of our most successful blog posts, titled “How to Do Link Removal,” got its initial traffic because we purchased $500 of PPC the first month the blog post went live. People Googled “how to do link removal” and clicked on our link. StumbleUpon, Twitter, and other social networks also offer sponsored listings that you can take advantage of to get more distribution.

OUTREACH When you publish a great blog post, make a list of people who might be interested in the content and let them know about what you’re doing. Sometimes, a simple email can spark a discussion with influential people in your niche about who you are, what you’re

127 doing, and why you’re doing it. Don’t neglect this simple but effective method of promotion. Don’t assume that people will automatically know about your great piece of content. If you can’t fi nd an email address, send a Facebook message or tweet at the infl uencers who you want to notice your content.

ADJUST If you fi nd that your infographics aren’t getting traction, stop. If your interviews are poorly received, don’t do them anymore. If your podcast is wildly successful, record them more often. When you realize that the how-to blog posts are the most visited on your site, you know the direction you should go. The point is that you need to look at your blog and adjust as necessary. Remember, the goal is to attract qualifi ed traffi c.

KEEP GOING Here’s where most people fail: they stop blogging. Nothing is more vital to the success of your blog than consistency. If you have a great blog and you stop producing content, it stops your momentum. People will gladly subscribe to your blog if you keep going. Even if you have to hire someone, or a team, to keep the blog going, do it. You’ll never regret it.

128 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC social media marketing.

The new insatiable beast in the field of online marketing is social media. Social media marketing involves sharing your content and building a brand presence on social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Google+, Tumblr, and others.

Social media marketing is the most explosive, unpredictable, and wildly diverse method for getting traffic to your website. It can work very well, but it’s not easy.

We’ve identified basic principles that can help you intelligently discuss and succeed in your social media efforts.

Success in social media is based on three factors:

1. Content

2. Connection

3. Consistency

CONTENT The content you share is the foundation of your social media strategy. In other words, if your strategy becomes successful, it will be because of your content. Remember that people generally only care about what your content means to them and why. If your social media strategy isn’t working, the content you are sharing doesn’t resonate with your audience’s wants and needs.

Social media marketing requires two kinds of content, microcontent and external content.

129 MICROCONTENT Microcontent is the introductory or stand-alone content that you post on the social media platforms themselves. It includes status updates, the CTAs that precede the URL you are sharing, Instagram photos, Vine videos, and tweets.

This microcontent must be compelling enough to convince users to click through to your website. In other words, you don’t want to tweet out your article title when sharing your blog content via Twitter—you want to be personable, conversational, or even controversial. Give your followers a reason to read. Use each tweet or Facebook post as an opportunity to encourage a connection with your brand. CTAs are a must.

The most compelling microcontent tends to be short, contain a higher ratio of verbs to nouns, and include an image. These are the posts that have the highest clickthrough rates. It also helps to customize each post for its particular platform. Don’t post the same microcontent to both Facebook and Twitter—you can share the same link, sure, but customize the microcontent. Examples of this are to the right.

EXTERNAL CONTENT External content is the blog or website content that you link to and introduce with microcontent on social media. This includes content from both your own blog and the websites/blogs of others in your niche.

The content you place on your blog is the fuel for your own salability on social media. If you want to really succeed in driving traffi c to your site with social media, focus on making the best quality content possible. Study the list of content categories for your blog and create shareable content. We recommend creating a variety of content for your blog so if something isn’t gaining traction on social media, you can share or create something else. ^^^ Above are examples of microcontent on various Karen the Healthy Food Blogger intends to share both social media platforms. her taste-test videos—the videos she makes of her kids taste testing new recipes—and controversial blog posts that tackle popular food and allergy trends. These

130 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC topics should gain traction with her audience if she posts them at the right time and offers her followers reasons to click the links.

It’s worth mentioning that most social media platforms offer some kind of a “sponsored post” that you can pay for on a PPC basis in order to increase engagement. We will cover these more in the PPC chapter of this section.

CONNECTION While sharing your own content is important, you shouldn’t just share what you’ve created. In fact, you should share more of other people’s content than your own. In social media marketing, we call this the 80/20 rule of social media—share 80% other people’s content, 20% your own.

If Karen were to follow the 80/20 rule, 20% of her social media content would include her videos, blog posts, recipes, and other content related to her healthy cooking site. The other 80% should be high-quality, shareable content created by others in her niche, like recipes by others that she has tried and liked, or controversial posts on allergies and diets that her followers might want to discuss.

It doesn’t have to be that in-depth either. In certain niches, other people’s content can simply mean a status update or tweet that includes an inspirational quote, a hot tip, or a bit of news. Just make sure that you are being social on social media and not inundating your followers with branded content.

In addition to sharing the work of others on social media, you need to comment and engage with the people in your community. To get love, you need to give love. Be generous with your attention to the people in your niche. Read and comment on blog posts, tweet and retweet, share stuff on Facebook, connect on LinkedIn— do everything you can to become a voice in your industry. As you do this, you’ll find new opportunities to interview, guest blog, create partnerships, and work out affiliate deals.

131 Karen spends an hour a day just reading, connecting, tweeting, commenting, and getting to know everyone she respects in the healthy cooking niche. She has been able to build relationships with others who are concerned with feeding healthy diets to their children.

Unlike Karen, some of our clients create very little original content because it’s just too much work. Instead, they have us use our social media tools to fi nd the best existing content about their industry and they share that content. But they still get traction with their social media efforts simply because they’re out there building connections.

Social media has given us new opportunities to engage with our customers. We recently met with a social media company that scours the social media world looking for people who ask questions about either your product or your keywords. Once that person is identifi ed, they alert you and you can engage with them by giving an offer for your product or answering any questions. You don’t have to use a service, though. Just search social networks for your keywords and fi nd opportunities.

Also, we’ve had clients tweet questions and concerns to us on our Twitter account. We’ve had success engaging with them in that public setting as well. Social media can be a powerful way to connect with customers because it is a public platform that gives you an opportunity to show that you care about their concerns.

We know an online marketer who tweets directly at companies that he has problems with. He gets immediate responses, and these responses often resolve his problems.

CONSISTENCY Perhaps the most important part of participating in social media is that you do it consistently. It’s unlikely that you’ll attract followers if you don’t show consistent attention to your blog, share others’ content,

132 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC and engage with your customers and your industry.

We recommend that you take at least 30 minutes a day to explore what’s happening in your industry and to comment and engage. We also recommended testing and tracking your social media posts to determine what kinds of posts perform best at different times of the day, and on what days. Performance can be measured by the number of social shares or likes/favorites your post receives, or the clickthrough rate.

Another element of consistency is making sure that your posts are fresh when your followers are paying attention. This means scheduling posts throughout the day in addition to your periods of active engagement. We recommend using an app like Buffer that allows you to craft and schedule your tweets and Facebook posts in advance. Many of these apps will also capture engagement statistics for each post so you can have them in one convenient location.

Since we started scheduling tweets for our Page One Power blog, the clickthrough rate to our site has increased significantly over the weekends when we’re not in the office. Karen could do the same thing and schedule a few tweets or Facebook posts to stay engaged with her community while she spends time with her kids.

If you pay attention to how your social media is going and study who is being successful in social media in your niche, you can start to get an idea of what you can do. Finding real success in social media requires a concerted, consistent effort.

133 email marketing.

Every time we mention email marketing to a new client, they claim that they’ve been “planning on doing that.” Many people know how useful a good email marketing program can be for their business, but few have the organizational skills to pull it off.

If you’re interested in using one of the most inexpensive and effective methods ever devised in marketing, listen up. This chapter will help.

Email marketing starts with creating a great blog with useful categories that you can use in your campaigns. The content that you generate on your blog is the vehicle that you’ll use to drive home your email marketing program.

Next, you need a reliable method for getting email addresses. Your email marketing program needs two things to be successful:

1. Good Content

2. An Email List

GOOD CONTENT Your email subscribers will keep reading your email if it’s well-written and elicits an emotional response. If it’s not useful to them, they’ll ignore it and might even report it as spam. It’s vital to have compelling, “good” content to share in your emails.

Here are some ideas for email marketing content:

1. The great content that you publish on your blog

2. Exclusive deals and news

3. Access to special events such as members- only webinars, sales, or live events

4. Offers to special deals you’ve secured just for your clients (affi liate sales)

134 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC 5. Tasteful advertising

6. Coupons

You’ll see a lot of value generated by your email marketing program if your email list knows that you’re offering useful content. And of course, you’ll get a higher level of engagement on your site each time you send out an email. When we send out our bi-monthly email to our Page One Power email list, we get a major traffic bump. Email marketing really brings in the traffic.

It’s a good idea to archive the emails you send to your clients. In fact, a page that lists all of your past emails can be a very useful resource for you and your clients.

BUILDING AN EMAIL LIST

GIVE IT AWAY Most of our WTC Web Marketers are trying to collect email addresses for their ongoing email marketing campaigns. They know the value of their lists and are actively looking to expand them. As they go about building their lists, they all acknowledge that if you offer something useful in exchange for an email address, your conversion rates go up. This is why we recommended that Javier the Musician just give away access to his forum and his downloadable guide. He’s gathering email addresses very quickly with that method.

Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach is leveraging the value of her paid newsletter and giving away a freemium version in exchange for email addresses.

Randy the Pet Blogger has been collecting email addresses a bit more slowly than he’d like, but he’s experimenting with the concept of writing an e-book that he’ll give away in exchange for email addresses.

As you build your email list, you’ll need to focus on quality. Make sure that you confirm every new

135 subscription through your email provider so you’re in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act (more about that later).

Keeping your list organized and carefully maintained is an important part of using email marketing as one of your methods for getting traffi c and making money.

MAKE YOUR EMAIL SIGN-UP EASY TO FIND Hopefully all of our WTC Web Marketers have made their site useful and interesting enough to inspire their visitors to want to receive regular emails. This is another reason that blogging and on-page content are so vital to your success online. But even with the best websites, if the email sign-up is diffi cult to fi nd, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Randy, Karen, Jennifer, Javier, and Daryl all have a goal to get email sign-ups. It’s worth their time to carefully consider the location, size, and look of their email sign-up forms. A popular web marketing blogger, Noah Kagan, operates okdork.com. He has done a fantastic job of making his email sign-up form both obvious and tasteful. Some people might ^^^ argue that it’s too much, but honestly, if he’s trying Above is an example of a to get email addresses as his primary goal, he’s simple attention grabbing doing a great job with his website. email sign-up.

If someone has to search for your email sign-up form, then you’ve got some work to do.

POP-UPS Recently, there has been a surge of websites that project email sign-up pop-ups when visitors come to these sites. These pop-ups either have to be closed or fi lled out with your email address. We haven’t seen any data on the effectiveness of these pop-up boxes, but we might argue that if sites continue to use them month after month, they are probably working. As annoying as they are, they haven’t deterred visitors from continuing on to the site.

EVENTS Going to trade shows and hosting webinars, seminars, and other events are excellent opportunities to gather

136 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC email addresses. Karen the Healthy Food Blogger’s cooking webinars should be an excellent email address generator. Her agreement to attend the webinar should have language that talks about the fact that the attendees are now on her email distribution list. Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach could have a trade show booth at community events and should have a giveaway that people can participate in when they give her their email address.

Email Marketing Basics

EMP EMP stands for email provider. You’ll need a commercial EMP to help you deliver your email because email filters won’t allow an individual to send a large amount of email from their personal email account. There are lots of EMPs (e.g. Constant Contact and MailChimp), but they all do the same thing: host your email content, maintain your email list, and give you analytics about open rates, clickthrough, and blocked and bounced email. But most importantly, they reliably deliver your mail.

Many EMPs will also help you be successful with your email campaign by offering prebuilt email templates and tips about the best days to send email, how to improve open rates, how to avoid spam complaints, and more.

CAN-SPAM ACT Every email marketing campaign is subject to laws and standards that you must comply with. In 2003, lawmakers enacted the CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) to help curb the tide of email spam. In 2009, the CAN-SPAM Act was revised to be even more specific.

137 Here are a few key takeaways from the CAN-SPAM Act, but we recommend reading the entire thing:

1. Your emails must include a clear way to opt- out of your emails, and opt-out requests must be honored within ten days.

2. Your emails must contain a valid postal address, usually in the footer.

3. Your emails must use accurate subject lines and headers.

4. Your “from” address must be a valid email address.

BE CAREFUL If your emails are perceived as spam (defi ned as an unsolicited commercial email) and the recipient clicks the button in their email labeled “spam,” you could lose your account with a reputable EMP. Even getting a few spam reports per thousand emails could get you in trouble.

The FTC can fi ne you $16,000 for each email that you’ve sent that violates the CAN-SPAM Act. For instance, in 2008, ATM Global Systems, Inc. was fi ned $442,900 for sending emails that displayed fake originating addresses and failed to let recipients know how they could unsubscribe. Be careful.

Here are a few ways you can minimize your spam complaints:

1. Verify when someone joins your email list. Send a confi rmation email.

2. Remind your subscribers how you got their email address in your emails.

3. Reinforce branding by making the look of your email template match your website color and layout.

138 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC OTHER PEOPLE’S LISTS Don’t ask anyone if you can use their list, and don’t let anyone use your list. This is bad for everyone. But you should be building partnerships with complementary businesses. When you build a high-quality partnership, your partner can send some of your useful content in an email blast to their list and you can do the same for them. It’s a powerful and inexpensive way to get traffic that we’ll discuss more in the Partnerships section.

The Four Elements of an Email

There are four elements of every email that you can control:

1. From Line

2. From Address

3. Subject Line

4. The Email Content

The first three parts of the elements of an email have one job: get the email opened. They need to work together to make your email marketing campaign a success.

FROM LINE With most EMPs, you can dictate exactly what your email recipients will see in terms of who the email is from. You can use your name, your company name, your nickname, etc. It’s best to use the name that most of your email recipients will recognize. If they are unsure who is sending them email, there is a higher chance that they’ll mark it “spam.”

We always recommend that you test what works best for you.

FROM ADDRESS The recipients on your email list will look to see who the email is coming from. They’ll check the “from” email address. Most EMPs will let you use

139 any working email address to send your email from. As with the “from” line, you can choose whatever you want that to be. Using the email address info@ pageonepower.com isn’t bad, but it might be more compelling to use [email protected] to personalize the email. Once again, you need to test to see which one gets the best open rates.

SUBJECT LINE This is perhaps the most important piece to getting an email opened. In our experience, the most effective subject lines hearken to something interesting in the email you’ve sent that compels the person to open it. This is a real challenge because most email programs only display between 30 and 50 characters.

This line is exactly just fi fty measly characters.

So you don’t have a lot of space. And to make it more complicated, most mobile devices only display about half that. So cut to the chase, get to the point, and make it happen right now. Give your audience a reason to open that email. Give them a sense of urgency.

Some examples include:

• Shoe Sale – Ends Today!

• Your Last Chance to Register

• 10 New Recipes That Use Kale

Like a door-to-door salesman, you’ve only got one tiny window of time to gain interest from your prospect. Don’t blow it with a lousy subject line. But as with everything in internet marketing, test it.

THE EMAIL CONTENT If you can get your emails opened, your next step is to get people to read them. This is where it gets complicated. Here are a few tips to help you as you put your fi rst email together:

140 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC 1. Place your most important content in the top left corner. Studies show that’s where people start reading an email. This opposes the best practice for website design, where the top right corner is the most read area.

2. Always clearly display your brand.

3. Make sure that your first headline is compelling. When people first open your email, they’ll see the headline. At that point they will choose whether or not to proceed with reading the message.

4. Make it short and sweet. Remember that the purpose of your email is to get someone to click on a link to go to a landing page. Don’t tell the whole story in the email. Just include enough of a teaser to provoke a click.

5. Optimize your images so they’re as small as possible (not in actual size, but in resolution and file size). You will want that email to load as quickly as possible.

6. Design for mobile. 70% of marketing emails are opened on a mobile device. Make your emails easy-to-read and mobile-ready.

Custom Email Templates EMPs have stockpiles of email templates that you can use, but most of them won’t fit your web design, your logo, or anything else related to your business. Do yourself a favor and have a professional design a custom template for you. It takes a talented web designer and developer, but if you’re serious about making your email marketing happen, you really should do this.

Email marketing is one of our favorite online marketing tools, but it requires a high level of organization. It’s an incredibly valuable method for building traffic and making money. Use it.

141 always clearly display your “brand.

142 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC seo.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the practice of optimizing your site to be the best possible target for search engines. In other words, SEO includes a series of tactics that will make your site more pleasing in the eyes of the search engines. When done correctly, you get free traffic from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines because when a web user searches for your keywords, you come up at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

When done incorrectly, you risk not receiving any traffic from the search engines because you won’t be found in the SERPs for your keywords.

What we love about SEO is that anyone who searches for your keywords is already interested in what you offer. It’s the most targeted traffic you can get online. Also, we love that the traffic is free. With our Page One Power website, we’ve gotten thousands and thousands of visitors we’ve never paid a penny for. It’s true that SEO itself can be costly, but the long-term return on investment (ROI) of SEO can be incomparable; once you rank for a keyword, those rankings can last for years.

On the downside, SEO projects require patience. It may take months for you to see results for your efforts. Also, SEO is ultimately out of your control. You can’t control what Google or Bing do with their rankings. Some projects work exceptionally well; some don’t.

SEO is based on keywords. It’s about making your site extremely conspicuous to the search engines for your specific keywords—the keywords related to your site or products. When we started to work on our Page One Power website for SEO, we made a list of keywords that we wanted to rank for. Some of those keywords were:

• Link Building Service • Link Building Company • Link Building Agency • Link Builders • SEO Link Builders • SEO Links

143 As you can see from the list above, our keywords were all several words long. Keyword phrases, regardless of the number of words, are just called “keywords” in SEO, though longer keyword phrases are sometimes referred to as “long-tail keywords.”

SEO isn’t for every website. There are websites that discuss topics that no one would search for, which makes it diffi cult to come up with keywords that correspond to them. We had a client come to us who had a coaching program that helped people make more money. While this is an attractive product, when we discussed her keywords, we couldn’t ever come up with a list that worked. Either the words were too abstract like “help me make more money,” or they were unlikely to be searched for, like “make more money.” Her keywords were too broad. SEO wasn’t a good fi t for her.

SEO also has been a challenge for Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach. The keyword “Personal Finance Coach” is too competitive—she doesn’t want to compete with well-known, established fi nancial gurus quite yet. We suggested a different approach: What if Jennifer were to think of keywords that were longer and were therefore less competitive? For instance, the phrase “how to start saving money.” The competition for this keyword is nowhere near as steep as the competition for “Personal Finance Coach,” and ranking could be as easy as writing a page about how to start saving money that used that phrase as the title.

Like Jennifer, SEO will work for you if:

1. Your keywords are identifi able

2. There are people searching for your keywords on search engines

BRANDED SEO Even if these things aren’t true of your site, we recommend doing a bit of branded SEO to everybody. Branded SEO involves making your site easier to fi nd for key brand terms, such as your name or the name of

144 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC your site. In this case, consider your name or the name of your brand keyword.

Keyword Research Keyword research is the first step in SEO, and the first step in keyword research is generating a list of possible keywords. Make a list of terms that describe your site or your product, or what you want people to search for in order to find you.

To research your list of keywords, search Google for “Keyword Planner” and their Keyword Planner will be one of the first choices.

Next, you need to figure out if anyone actually searches for anything on your list of terms. Google has a tool that will allow you to see if people are searching for what you’re offering. If you enter your list of keywords into the Keyword Planner, Google will let you know how many people per month search for each term. For instance, when we used the Keyword Planner, we found that 4900 people per month searched for the term “Link Building Service.” This gave us the confidence that if we were to rank highly in the SERPs for “Link Building Service,” we could get targeted traffic.

When conducting keyword research, use one part keyword data and four parts common sense. Sometimes, you’ll find that the Keyword Planner will tell you that no one is searching your terms. Don’t worry about this right away—this data can be inaccurate. Use your common sense. We’ve optimized websites for keywords that the Keyword Planner said didn’t drive any traffic, and we found that the traffic was there.

Conversely, we’ve done SEO projects for keywords that the Keyword Planner said received lots of traffic, but we had our doubts, which were ultimately correct— there wasn’t any traffic there. For example, when we originally did the keyword research for Page One Power, one of the keywords the Keyword Planner said gets a ton of traffic was “building links.” This sounded weird

145 to us because it’s a phrase that humans wouldn’t use.

The Keyword Planner is a computer program that doesn’t know what sounds weird or what sounds conversational. We knew this so we didn’t use this keyword.

Basically, if you’re confi dent that there is traffi c for your keywords, go for it. Use the Keyword Planner as a tool to help you make your decision.

When we did the keyword research for Bill the Attorney, we found that almost no one was searching for bankruptcy attorneys in his area. Bill was surprised by the keyword research. He was sure that there were people searching for bankruptcy attorneys in his town. We also thought that this didn’t sound right, so we suggested that Bill go forward with an SEO project anyway.

Sometimes, when there are less than 100 searches a month for a keyword, Google will say there is zero. Again, use your common sense. If you’re looking to rank locally like Bill, results just shy of 100 searches per month can represent a huge increase in the number of leads you receive.

Karen the Healthy Food Blogger’s site was an interesting case in terms of SEO. As you may recall, her website talks about healthy cooking and offers healthy recipes. Her site publishes recipes for gluten- free, vegetarian, vegan, and several other specialty diets. When we did the keyword research for her site, we found thousands of keyword combinations that we could pursue. The project would be huge.

Karen’s keyword situation is not unique. Media sites will often relate to thousands of keywords because the content on media sites can be vast and grow daily. Unlike most lead generation and e-commerce websites, whose keyword lists are more manageable, a media site has a never-ending keyword target list.

We taught Karen the basics of SEO. She did her best to optimize each page on her site as she went along. Learning sound SEO principles allowed her to leverage

146 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC her existing content and to keep on top of new content as it was added to her site. Now, when she adds a new soup recipe to her site, she knows the specific things that she needs to do to get that recipe found in the search engines. If Karen optimizes each page that she adds to her site, her search engine traffic will build.

Finding keywords is just the beginning of SEO. Because SEO is about making your site the best candidate for certain keywords, knowing which ones to pursue is important. It’s sad to find out that the keywords that you’ve been pursuing aren’t very good. Take your time and do it right.

Once you’ve identified the keywords that make sense to you, it’s time to implement them on your site. Adding these keywords in the right places and in the right way can turn your website’s SEO around. We’ll discuss the places that you can add your keywords in the next few sections.

Learning the basics of SEO will give you a foundation that you can use to apply SEO to your site. It will also help you know the right questions to ask your SEO specialist, if you hire one.

147 SHOP TALKhow Google works Google certainly isn’t the only search engine, but they are currently the most utilized, so it’s useful to know how they function when it comes to SEO.

If you want to please Google, you need to understand how it works. There are two things you need to know about how Google works that will help you understand SEO.

1. GOOGLE USES ITS OWN COPY OF THE WEB. When you search Google, you are searching its copy of the web, not the actual live web. Google has computer programs scouring the web all day and night looking for web pages. These programs –called spiders, bots, or crawlers— fi nd web pages, copy them, and take them back to Google for their fi les. Once they are in the fi les, Google reads the words on the page and indexes that page in its humongous index. When you search Google, they go into their fi les and retrieve the best result for your search. Google uses its own fi les to give you results, not the live web.

2. GOOGLE SEES YOUR WEBSITE AS A COLLECTION OF WEB PAGES When people ask us to help them get their website higher in Google, we chuckle. It’s a nerdy laugh because we know something they don’t know: Google ranks web pages, not websites. To Google, a website is a collection of pages; it’s not the singular unit we conceptualize. Google sees individual web pages and their individual value. This is what Google’s crawlers read to

determine whether to index your^^^ page or not.

148 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC The Three Pillars of SEO

There are three SEO elements you need to consider for your website:

1. Technical

2. Content

3. Links

YOUR WEBSITE MUST BE TECHNICALLY SOUND Your website lives in a complex world of servers and IP addresses. If you want Google to rank your website, it needs to be technically sound. It doesn’t need to be perfect— just good enough for Google to find it and index it.

As a rule of thumb, your web pages are technically okay if they can be found by Google. If Google can’t find them, Google’s spiders can’t crawl and index them. To find out if Google can find your pages, copy one of your web page URLs and paste it into the search bar in Google.

If your web page isn’t found, there could be many reasons for the problem. Every web page has a small bit of information on it called the robots.txt file. This file is opened every time a search engine crawls your site. This file tells the search engine if you want the search engine to index your page or not. It might seem obvious that people want their websites to be found by Google, but there are pages on your site that you might want excluded, such as your unique landing pages for PPC and display ad campaigns. If you are building a new site that isn’t ready for the world to see, you might want to set your robots.txt file to noindex. We’ve seen entire websites set to noindex for years only to have the site owner grow more frustrated each year, wondering why they’re still not showing up in Google’s SERPs.

In the same way your robots.txt file might be preventing your site from being found, the metadata on your web pages can tell search engines not

149 to index your page. If you right-click on your page, select “view source,” search for “, and fi nd it, it means that your web page won’t go into the search engine index.

Also, popular web development technologies like Flash can only be indexed by Google if they’re also available in a text format. To see if you have this on your web pages, turn off your Flash player on your browser and load your web page. If large parts of your web page aren’t showing up, you’ve got an issue. You need to fi nd a way to display your content using other technology besides Flash. If your page isn’t found, you need to ask a professional SEO for help.

Sometimes, Google will be able to fi nd certain pages on your website, but not others. You need to look at each page that you care about having indexed in Google. Because Google uses its own fi les to refer users to websites, if Google can’t index your pages, you will never be found in searches.

If you are trying to rank for a competitive keyword, you should ask a professional SEO to help you optimize a few additional technical aspects of your website. If you are looking to rank for a moderate to not-so competitive keyword set, you should be okay as long as your web page is in the Google index.

It’s also important to note that the speed of your site matters, too. Google wants to give their users websites that load quickly. If your website loads slowly, you need to ask a web developer how you can speed it up. There are many online tools that will tell you if your website loads too slowly. Just Google it!

YOUR WEBSITE MUST HAVE HIGH-QUALITY, ORIGINAL CONTENT If your web page is found in Google, then you’re eligible to be found for a keyword— you’re ready to play the game.

150 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC But the words on your web page are what put you in the game.

When Google finds your web page and puts it in their files, it reads the words on the page. Those words tell Google what the web page is about. Google can read and assign a grade level to the writing. It can also tell if the writing has been plagiarized from another website. If it’s plagiarized, Google won’t give that web page credit for the writing and it can’t rank for relevant keywords. Your writing must be original to get rankings in Google.

Remember, the words on a web page are the only way Google can tell what the page is all about. There are several different places where you can put textual content on a web page.

Title A web page title is the single most important piece of written content on the page. Your page title tells Google what your main keyword is and what the web page is all about. Like the title of a book, it gives a glimpse into what the user will be reading on the web page.

Google uses the title to set the stage for what is expected on the web page. Consequently, they place a lot of value on what your title is. Updating titles on your web pages can drastically improve rankings in Google. We’ve done simple title changes for our clients and seen changes in the search engine rankings in as little as a week.

The title is shown in your browser on the tab in which the web page is displayed. The title is also the blue link that you click on in the SERPs when you conduct a search. If you’re unsure of what your page’s title is, right-click on your web page and click “view page source.” When you do that, you’ll see the actual programming for your web page. Next, search (Ctrl+f) for title. You’ll find it between these brackets: .

If you’re trying to rank your website for lots of terms, you’ll need to make sure each web page has its own

151 unique title. Karen the Healthy Food Blogger, for example, went through all of her recipe pages and re-titled them to refl ect the search terms that she wants them to rank for. Here are some examples of titles that she changed:

Original Title: Updated Title:

Pumpkin Brownie Healthy Brownie Recipe | Pumpkin Brownie Recipe

Super Duper Veggie Soup Vegetarian Soup Recipe | Best Vegetable Soup Recipe

My Kids Fav After School Snack Healthy Snack | Healthy Snack For Kids

As you can see, her original titles were conversational and natural for her to write. The updated titles are geared toward people who don’t know about her exact recipes but are searching for what her recipes contain. Her “Super Duper Veggie Soup” is delicious, but no one would search Google for “Super Duper Veggie Soup.” They would, however, search for a “Vegetarian Soup Recipe” or “Best Vegetable Soup Recipe.”

If you want to successfully title your pages, you need to think like someone who doesn’t know you but would be searching for what your web page offers. Slang, cute, and folksy language doesn’t usually work very well for web page titles. Karen felt nervous about changing her titles because she wasn’t sure what to use. We assured her that she could change the titles of her pages multiple times as she gets more comfortable and confi dent with her ability to select titles. She has learned that writing titles is both an art and a science.

Headings Google also deciphers what your web pages are about by reading your headings. Search engines read the content on your web pages and search for your heading tags. These tags are labeled in the source code of your web page using tags numbered H1-H6. H1 is the most important heading and H6 is the least important heading.

152 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC When you prepare a piece of content for your web page, you want to make sure that your header tags include keywords that you want that piece to rank for. For instance, Karen might add a recipe and a description of the recipe. The title of her web page should reflect the search term that she wants her recipe to rank for. But because there are many keywords that could be used to find her recipe, she needs to include these terms in the body copy of the recipe. Then, she needs to reinforce the use of the main keyword in the H1 tag and other less important keywords in the H2, H3, etc. tags.

In the above examples of Karen’s titles, she uses the title “Healthy Brownie Recipe” because she wants to be found in the search engines for that keyword. On the recipe page, she should also attach the H1 tag to the heading on the page that also reads “Healthy Brownie Recipe.” The title and H1 tag align, telling Google that this page is a strong candidate for the search term “Healthy Brownie Recipe.” Further down the page, she should use other keywords in her H2, H3, H4, and other headings that support “Healthy Brownie Recipe.” She could use the headings “Pumpkin Brownie Recipe,” “Delicious Healthy Brownie Recipe,” and so forth.

Body Copy The copy on your web page is the meat on the bones of your titles and headings. We studied with an SEO years ago who said that textual content on a web page is the currency of the search engines. The more text, the more valuable your web page is.

If you have a web page without any textual content, you will find that it’s much, much more difficult to rank than if you have 300 or more words on a web page.

Writing SEO copy is an art and a science. We have found it best to select a list of keywords that you want your web page to rank for and then to sprinkle those different words into the copy. But please, remember to just sprinkle them—if you include your keywords so many times that your text reads as unnatural, Google will be able to detect this and will punish your site accordingly.

153 Javier the Musician was keen on writing his own SEO copy, so we coached him through the process. He wanted the page that had his free report about how to get gigs for your band to be returned in Google for the search term “How to Get Gigs.” His keyword research and his knowledge of the industry told him that people searching for this phrase would be happy to fi nd his report and his forum. We selected a space on his landing page to place this text and wrote this list of keywords for him to sprinkle into the copy:

How to get gigs for my band

Getting good gigs

How to make money in a band

Help with getting gigs

Get more gigs

Finding places to get gigs

These keywords are all keywords that Javier thinks people will search in Google to help them with the same basic problem. His research showed him that the main keyword, “How to Get Gigs,” was the most popular, and therefore will be his title. But the other keywords are valuable, too. So he’s going to include them in the 300-word textual content on this page.

One thing that we warned Javier about was that he initially put his keywords in unnatural places in his copy so they would appear more often. We recommended that he use his keywords in a natural way. We reminded him that if it sounds unnatural, it probably appears that way to his readers and to Google.

Here’s what his web copy now looks like:

154 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC Javier, the musician:

How to Get Gigs

Are you sick and tired of trying to figure out how to get gigs for your band?

Are you working hard for free?

Are you getting gigs but need to work on getting the good gigs?

Do you want to learn about getting paying gigs?

Make More Money with Your Band

Figuring out how to make money with your band is tough. I know because I’ve been there! I also know that when I wanted to make more money with my band, I wanted help getting more gigs, too. If this sounds like you, then you’re in the right place. My free report will teach you how to get gigs by focusing on getting more gigs and getting paying gigs.

If you’ve worked on your sound and know who you are as a band but haven’t found the right place to play, I can help. If you play like crazy for free but struggle to pay your rent, I can help. If you are dedicated to your band’s success but keep hitting a brick wall, I can help.

Getting Good Gigs

Finding places to get gigs can be a challenge. I’ve worked in the live music industry for over 15 years and have played everywhere from the basement of my Grandma’s house to huge venues with thousands of people.

Click the button below to get my free ”How to Get Gigs for Your Band” download and learn about how to get great paying gigs.

155 Once you download this free PDF, you’ll automatically be enrolled in our live music forum where you can learn from others like you. We’ll cover topics ranging from how they found their best sound, how they found the best equipment, and how they got paying gigs for their band. It’s free, and I know it’ll help.

Javier placed this copy on his landing page and changed the title to “How to Get Gigs.” He started to get traffi c. This traffi c was so exciting that he has plans to add SEO content to all of his landing pages.

Javier struggled with writing the fi rst few pages of content for SEO. Writing SEO copy is a learned skill. The fi rst few times will be like pulling teeth slowly. But as you continue to write, it will get easier. If you keep going beyond that, it actually gets fun. We have an entire offi ce full of enthusiastic SEO copywriters that can attest to this.

The textual content of websites and web pages is often the stumbling block that people can’t overcome when it’s time to get traffi c. It can be hard work to sit down and do this, but the rewards are always there if you can focus enough to do it.

156 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC YOU MUST HAVE INBOUND LINKS POINTING TO YOUR WEBSITE In 1996, two Stanford graduate students had an original idea. They theorized that if a search engine used links pointing to a web page to determine its overall value to the web and not just the words on the page, then they could more accurately identify the best pages on the web. If other websites linked to a web page and “recommended” it, then that page must be good.

Their experience in the academic world helped them define this theory. For example, if you were to write a thesis and then multiple people were to cite your research, it gives your thesis more credibility. Likewise, a web page with a bunch of inbound links directed towards it must be more credible and worthy of getting higher rankings in the search engines.

This was a new concept that Sergey Brin and Larry Page decided to call “backrub”: a search engine on the Stanford servers. A year later, they renamed the website “Google” (a play on a mathematical concept), and the rest is history.

This original concept is the backbone of the Google and Bing search engines. In order to get a web page to rank, it needs to be technically sound, have original text, and have some links going to it from other websites. We started Page One Power in 2011 to help people get links pointing to their web pages. This is all we do. The process is called “link building.”

If you want your web pages to rank, you need to get links from other websites. It’s that simple. But actually acquiring these links can be a tricky process.

This process starts with having a website worthy of getting links. Why would someone link to your site? Does your website have value? Is it worth a link?

If you can answer “yes” to these questions, then you can start to find sites that could give you a link and ask them for that link.

157 Link building can be broken down into two categories:

1. Getting industry links that don’t require content

2. Promoting your content to get links

LINKS THAT DON’T REQUIRE CONTENT Almost every industry has associations, directories, and resource pages dedicated to helping people fi nd businesses that relate to each other. Finding websites that make sense for you to be a part of that will give you a link is the fi rst step in any link building campaign.

For instance, Randy’s animal rights and pet care blog exists in two distinct niche industries: animal rights and pet care. Randy needs to fi nd every opportunity to go out and get links on any site that lists sites in these niches. Randy should get a link on every animal rights and pet care association, group, and forum. This will show the search engines that his site is a valuable part of the online community for his industries.

PROMOTING YOUR CONTENT TO GET LINKS Randy the Pet Blogger needs to think about promoting the specifi c, useful content that he has to offer after getting baseline industry links. His podcast, the more popular blog posts, and the interviews he’s planning are all great content. Randy can fi nd websites that will appreciate this content where he can ask for links. Link building can supercharge the content you are producing.

Link building requires only two steps:

1. Find target site 2. Ask for link

There are many strategies for fi nding sites and asking for links, but for now it’s important to know that acquiring links is important.

How many links will you need? It depends on the other websites you are competing with. If your keyword

158 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC is “iPod Case” then you are in a very competitive situation. You’ll probably need a few hundred links. If your keyword is “ceramic fireplace logs,” you probably only need a few links to compete. But you’ll need links for almost any keyword these days if you want to be found in the organic search results.

SEO is a valuable strategy because it is estimated that search engines direct almost 40% of all traffic on the web, and all of that traffic is directed to exactly what web users are looking for. Learning the basics of SEO is something that every would-be internet marketer should do. ppc.

Of course, not all of the results for your query will be organic search results. PPC ads related to your keywords will show up in the SERPs, too.

PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click. You can buy traffic to your site on a pay-per-click basis with many websites, the most prominent being Google. Google earns nearly all of its revenue from selling PPC in their SERPs.

You can set up a PPC account with Google and buy certain keywords that your PPC ad will show up in the SERPs for. For example, if Bill the Attorney wants to be displayed in Google when someone in his area searches Google for a divorce attorney, he can purchase PPC advertising in Google so that when people search for “divorce attorney,” his ad will be displayed along with all the other regular organic (non-paid) links.

Bill will have to intentionally go out and purchase that ad in the Google ad center. He’ll have to set up his Google account, select the keyword, write the ad, and enter his credit card information. Bill also might want to have his ad displayed when someone searches for a bankruptcy attorney or an adoption attorney in his area. He can do that in the ad center, too.

159 Google isn’t the only place on the web that sells PPC advertising. Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines sell PPC just like Google does.

Your PPC keywords will be the same as your SEO keywords, and you should use the same Keyword Planner tool to determine your optimal keywords. In fact, many professional SEOs use PPC as a testing ground to see which keywords deliver the best visitor and conversion rates. They’ll get their SEO keyword list and test all the keywords against each other. DYK? Eventually, they fi nd their “money” keywords, and when they do, they pursue these keywords in organic PPC ads are usually, search. More information on fi nding your keywords can but not always, text- be found in the SEO section of this chapter. based ads. Some PPC advertising Many social networks also sell PPC. Facebook, (like Facebook’s PPC LinkedIn, and Twitter all have their own particular “Sponsored Posts”) brand of PPC that you can purchase. These social allows you to include networks focus on who will get your ad as opposed images with your to what keywords you would like to have your ad displayed for. They zero in on personal profi les text, but usually you and deliver PPC ads that will send traffi c. Javier only have the text to the Musician, for instance, could use Facebook to work with. Display advertise his live music site by selecting the right ads are exclusively demographic. It’s remarkable just how specifi c you can graphic-based image get with paid social media advertising. advertising. How PPC Ads Work With the larger sites like Google, Facebook, and others, you purchase PPC ads based on a budget. You can choose the times and dates your ads will be displayed and then establish how much you are willing to spend over a certain timeframe. Once your budget is met, they will stop displaying your ads.

Each different PPC ad keyword has its own price. The most sophisticated technology Google has developed is their ad pricing system. It’s an incredible system— they instantly determine exact pricing for each click of billions of keywords. We’ve seen clicks cost as little as $0.15 and as much as $100 per click. Google knows

160 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC the value and competition level of every keyword and they charge accordingly.

Karen the Healthy Food Blogger might want to dedicate some of her marketing budget to PPC. She has just released an excellent new selection of vegan recipes on her site and would like to get some traffic sooner than her SEO strategy will allow. She set up her PPC account in the Google AdWords center and selected the keyword “Vegan Recipes.” She saw that that keyword was selling for just less than $1 per click on Google, so she set her daily budget for $50. Because that keyword has so much traffic, her budget was exhausted by noon.

Karen didn’t get anyone to sign up for her newsletter, so she tried a different strategy. She purchased a long- tail keyword, “Vegan Salad Dressing.” That keyword was also just less than $1 per click, and she set the same $50 budget. In this case, her PPC budget didn’t get used in a day. In fact, it never gets used up completely, but she finds that she gets a higher number of newsletter subscribers with the long-tail keyword. She learned the more targeted the traffic, the higher the number of conversions.

Ad Groups As Karen gains a more sophisticated knowledge of PPC, she’ll want to set up ad groups to keep her ads organized. Ad groups are selections of different keyword concepts organized into groups. Her vegan recipe ad group might start with the keywords “vegan recipes” and “vegan salad dressing.” But as she continues to develop her vegan recipe section, she may want to purchase words like “vegan soup recipes,” “vegan lunch recipes,” etc. All these keywords relate to her vegan recipe ad group. Google saves those ad groups in her account. Karen can add as many ad groups as she’d like so, when she’s ready to dedicate some budget to them, they’re ready to go.

You can set up as many ad groups as you’d like, and they can sit dormant until you’re ready to invest in them. Best practice with ad groups says

161 that you shouldn’t use more than 30 different keywords per ad group, though.

The Anatomy of a PPC Ad Although PPC ads appear simple, they offer a huge range of results based on the use of their simple elements. In fact, there is an entire industry focused on the optimization of PPC ads. Thousands of companies spend millions and millions of dollars on PPC. They want to make sure they get the most for their money, so they’re constantly testing the following four elements to optimize their PPC ROI:

1. Headline

2. Display URL

3. Body

4. Destination URL/Landing Page

HEADLINE The top of your PPC ad is called the headline. Its only job is to elicit interest and get the user to read the rest of the ad. The headline on Google is displayed at the top of the ad in blue, bolded text. In the organic SERPs, this link is the title of your web page, but in PPC, you can determine the copy of the headline to read as whatever you want (within certain acceptable guidelines).

Although many people use PPC and don’t vary the elements of their ads, it’s worthwhile to test all sorts of combinations using different headlines. We like to test two different headlines for one particular PPC ad at a time. We know which headline performs better within a month.

DISPLAY URL Immediately below your headline is your display URL. This doesn’t have to be the same URL as the actual URL of the page you want to direct users to. For example, Karen wants to drive traffi c to the vegan recipe section on her website with PPC, but the actual

162 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC URL of that page is www.karenswebsite.com/recipes/ veganrecipes.php. It’s long and hard to read. To simplify the URL so it’s easy to read, she displays just www.karenswebsite.com. When someone clicks on her ad, they’re still directed to her vegan recipes page.

It’s best to give your user a simplified glimpse of where they’re going with the display URL. Google insists that your display URL is on the actual domain that you’re sending the user to.

BODY Underneath the display URL is the body of the PPC ad. The body copy usually consists of two to three lines of copy that further elicit interest in your ad. This is another place where you can experiment to see what works best.

For example, Karen’s PPC Ad might look like this:

DESTINATION URL/LANDING PAGE Once a user has clicked on your ad, where do they go? They don’t have to go to your homepage. Professional web marketers frequently create landing pages that are set up specifically for certain keywords. Karen might want to set up a unique landing page just for her PPC campaign. This page could list her vegan recipes and invite visitors to sign up for her newsletter when new recipes are posted.

She can experiment with using her PPC-specific page versus her regular landing page. Karen could also set up other landing page concepts that she can test against each other to see which one works best. This process is known as conversion optimization. Testing your ads, headlines, body copy, and URLs in PPC can be a never-ending, though worthwhile, process.

163 PPC is Like a Door-to-Door Salesman We can compare your PPC ad campaign to a door- to-door salesman. After the salesman knocks and someone answers, the salesman gives their opening line. If all goes well, they can get into the front room. At this point the salesman can give their sales pitch and hope for a sale. Your PPC ad’s headline, destination URL, and body copy are your opening line. If a user clicks on the ad, you’re in the front room with your landing page. If your landing page is good enough, you can make the “sale.” If you can imagine the staggering variety of techniques different salesmen use, you can begin to appreciate the depth of possibilities with PPC.

If Karen can fi gure out how to predictably get clickthroughs to her landing page and sign-ups for her newsletter, she has a guaranteed method for achieving her goal to build a large newsletter list. Professional PPC managers use complicated equations to calculate the ROI for their PPC campaigns. In this way, PPC can be a “guaranteed win,” but it takes a lot of work to get to that point.

164 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC display ads.

Display ads are the visual advertisements you see all over the web. Sometimes they’re called banner ads. Whatever you call them, these ads include an image that a visitor clicks on to take them to the target landing page.

As we discussed in the advertising portion of “W,” display ads can either be sold on a PPC, CPA, CPC, or CPM basis. Any way you cut it, you can use them to drive traffic to your site.

However, display ads can be expensive and challenging to produce. Web marketers will often start by running a less expensive PPC campaign and only move onto display ads when they have adequate resources. As you will see, most of our WTC Web Marketers’ sites aren’t developed enough to warrant a display ad campaign.

Also unlike PPC, which exists mainly on major websites like Google, Bing, and Facebook, display ads are found everywhere— you can find places to post display ads all over the web. To get your ad displayed, you need to find either a display ad network or a specific website that sells direct advertising.

Ad Networks Ad networks have built portfolios of websites that have agreed to allow the ad network to post whatever ad best fits the user visiting their site. Ad networks are the middleman between you as the advertiser, and the publisher who displays your ad.

There are a lot of ad networks out there. Many ad networks specialize in certain demographics, so if you’re looking for a particular type of person, you can search Google for the ad network that’s just for you. You’ll find more networks than you could ever use. Ad networks will help you set up your ad and then will display that ad across their publisher network. These networks usually have established relationships with

165 thousands of websites that display their ads.

You can target specifi c websites to advertise on if you know exactly where your customers go online. Page One Power does this with a small handful of SEO websites. We make ads that are specifi cally designed for our advertising websites and pay each month on a CPM basis to have our ads displayed.

Like PPC, the art of actually making money with display ads is an entire industry to itself. The variety of display ads is astonishing. The basic elements of a display ad are:

1. Image

2. Headline

3. Movement

4. Landing Page

IMAGE The body of the ad is the image. The image could be a photograph, a graphic, or an illustration. Whatever it is, its job is to get attention.

For example, if Javier the Musician were to run a display ad campaign for his most popular guide, “How to Get More Gigs,” the ad could contain a photograph of a band standing by their instruments in their garage, but instead of playing, they’re reading Javier’s guide.

HEADLINE The headline in the ad is the promise of what will be found on the page the user will be directed to if they click on the ad. Test your ideas by directing different headlines to the same landing page to see which one works best.

Javier could run a test that funnels the headlines “Tired of performing for your cat?” and “How to Get More Gigs” to the same landing page to see which ad directs more traffi c to his page. He can use whichever one worked best the next month, or even test it against a third.

166 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC MOVEMENT Many display ads incorporate movement of some sort. HTML 5 and Adobe Flash are both acceptable means to get movement in your display ads. We’ve used movement in our Page One Power display ad campaigns with success. Javier’s ad might have a cat walk across the bottom of the ad.

LANDING PAGE When someone clicks on your display ad, they will be taken to a landing page. It’s usually best to have a specifi c landing page dedicated to the headline on your display ad. Like PPC landing pages, the variety and effectiveness of landing pages varies wildly.

Javier decided to run a display campaign directed to a special resource page that offered all of his resources related to getting more gigs. He placed a display ad on a small music forum that he participates in, and it resulted in 50 new email addresses for his list. For Javier, display ads will continue to lead to success.

Usually, display ad campaigns are a more advanced form of getting traffi c. They are very useful because they give more detailed information about where the web user is going to go when they click the ad.

Above are examples of imagery for display ads. The upper is an ad for Page One Power Link Building and the lower is an example of an ad Javier the musician may use to get traffi c to his site.

167 partnerships.

Your customers don’t only exist to buy your products or services. You provide them with something that they need at a certain moment. You are a part of an overall solution to something they are doing with their lives. If you can think about what you offer your customers in context with the natural fl ow of their lives, you can take part in one of the most dynamic and rewarding marketing channels available: partnerships.

Think to yourself: Who needs your product or service before and after they need yours? Who do you naturally affi liate with? Do you already refer your customers to someone that can help them with their next logical problem? For instance, Javier the Musician’s site serves band members who are looking to gain more information about how to improve their band. They fi nd information on his site and then go and practice their instruments, purchase equipment, fi nd promotional opportunities, and think about recording an album. Javier doesn’t do these things, but his customers need these services. There are companies that provide equipment, promotional opportunities, and recording services. Javier can build partnerships with those companies and work together for mutual benefi t. DYK? If you can start to think about your product or service in the context of your customer’s overall Partnership marketing situation, you can start to comprehend the power of partnership marketing. is the most inexpensive and intensive type of The hard part of partnership marketing is that you online marketing. Like can’t buy it. You can’t just order partnerships and they say, it’s not what pay with PayPal. Partnerships are the fruit of an you know, it’s who you organized, consistent plan that usually require a lot know, and nowhere else of your time and attention. is this more true than in partnerships. For example, Page One Power’s customers are savvy SEOs who are looking to outsource their link building. Savvy SEOs use Page One Power’s service, but they also use SEO tools, PPC management agencies, and content providers. Sure, SEOs go to the gym, eat at restaurants, and have their clothes dry cleaned, but

168 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC that’s not the tie that binds us together. We are tied to SEO tools, PPC management agencies, and content providers because they need link building like we need them. We’re just one cog of their SEO wheel. These services don’t compete with us, and our clients, the savvy SEOs, use them as well as our services.

As such, a good partner:

1. Has a business that is relevant to yours

2. Has a robust client base

3. Does not directly compete with you

4. Has the same clientele as you

Make a List, Build Relationships When we decided to focus on partnerships for Page One Power, we identified these three different verticals: SEO tools, PPC management agencies, and content providers.

Once we had these verticals in mind, we made a long list of everyone out there that offers these services. From that list, we identified several of each that we felt would best fit our specific clients. We called, emailed, tweeted, and started to build a relationship with each one.

When we felt that our relationship was solid enough, we asked if they’d like to do a joint webinar. We would host the webinar, and they could talk about how useful their product or service is for half of the webinar. The other half would feature us talking about link building and how it works. Both partners sent emails inviting our own clients to the webinar. If the webinar went well, then we pursued other opportunities like special offers for their product to our clients and vice versa. When the relationship developed fully, we placed links on our site under the page “Partners” and they did the same. The cost for these partnerships was negligible, and they have resulted in qualified leads.

169 There aren’t any rules for this type of marketing. We’ve seen such a wild variety within partnerships. One common type of partnership marketing involves co-branded promotions. Javier could offer a free bundle of guitar picks from a guitar e-commerce website with every new forum sign-up, and likewise, the guitar site could offer a free trial subscription to Javier’s forum with a guitar purchase. Karen the Healthy Food Blogger could place links to a reputable cookware retailer in exchange for a page of great recipes on the cookware website.

Randy the Pet Blogger’s relationship with activist organizations could be leveraged with a monthly write- up about the activities of the group on his blog in exchange for a link to his site on theirs.

Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach has started to identify the industries that her clients use before and after they talk with her. She has found that bankruptcy attorneys, like Bill the Attorney, know a lot of people who could use her help. Because “ bankruptcy attorneys are hard to get in touch with, she decides to approach bankers, too. She has started to offer free webinars that local bankers can invite their clients to listen to. Her approach to partnerships is slow at fi rst, but she hopes to offer high-quality webinars that local bankers can sell upstream on a regional basis. Then Jennifer can have greater reach and attract more clients.

Jennifer could also provide Bill with a free fi nancial tip to go out in his monthly newsletter in exchange for a link on her website to him as a preferred bankruptcy attorney.

Often, people are reticent to engage with other businesses because they’re afraid of being rejected. Don’t let that stand in your way of building a robust partnership relationship. We’ve seen very large companies work with small ones because they want to look like they’re part of the local economy. Make your lists and go forward with bravado.

170 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC a good “partner:

1. Has a business that is relevant to yours 2. Has a robust client base 3. Does not directly compete with you 4. Has the same clientele as you

171 affi liate marketing.

Affi liate marketing basically involves getting other websites to act as salespeople that will drive traffi c to your site. We discussed the concept of making money with affi liate marketing earlier in the book, but this time around we’re going to talk about how you can get traffi c by helping others make money with your product.

Jennifer the Personal Finance Coach’s website is a perfect fi t for affi liate marketing. Her information products generate an enormous profi t margin, and she has developed them into niche-specifi c products, like “How to Double Your Income by Picking the Right Mutual Funds.” She has developed her landing pages and is submitting her products to affi liate networks.

Setting Up an Affi liate Program Every website that sells something should have an affi liate program. Establishing your own affi liate program usually involves making policies, rules, and forms that describe what you’re willing to offer someone who wants to send traffi c to you and get paid for it. There are lots of great guides online, and every industry varies, so we recommend that you Google “affi liate program.” You’ll fi nd all that you’d ever want to know about the topic.

The important thing to note here is that you will need a page on your site that describes your affi liate program. If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you can submit your affi liate program to affi liate networks and see if you can get affi liate marketers to market your products.

Affi liate Networks There are many prominent affi liate networks that you can step into and gain traffi c from. These networks are marketplaces that join affi liate marketers and publishers. The affi liates browse the networks to fi nd products and services to sell. Jennifer would be wise to isolate certain products (preferably high-profi t

172 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC products) and make landing pages to submit to affiliate networks. Then she can wait for affiliate marketers to find her and start to promote her products.

There are thousands of affiliate marketers looking for the next big thing. They love products that are niche- focused, yield a high profit, and that they can do SEO and PPC for. Getting affiliate marketers to promote your products means that you have to give up a piece of the profits, but if you consider that you’d never get the traffic and sales that affiliate marketers will bring you, it’s kind of a no-brainer.

You’re a good candidate for an affiliate network if you have a product or service that is niche-focused— the more specific, the better. Affiliate marketers look for keywords in SEO and PPC that aren’t very competitive so they can use those two tools to get traffic to your pages. You’d be hard-pressed to find a professional affiliate marketer to sell your “How to Make More Money Online” product because doing SEO and PPC for those keywords is tough. If you, however, have a product like “Building Your Own Christmas Light Installation Empire,” you’re in business.

Your product or service also needs to have a large margin. The more profit, the better. Affiliate marketers want as much as possible, and they’ll perform based on their reward. This is why this method will work well for Jennifer.

If you aren’t a good candidate for an affiliate network, you can just build your own. But it’s important to recognize that if you’re not a good fit for a network, maybe you’re not a good fit for affiliate marketing. You can build your own network by building a list of sites that are relevant to your product and reaching out to them, asking if they’d like to be an affiliate of your product. It’s kind of old school and clunky, but on a one-to-one basis, it can be effective. Bill the Attorney might really benefit from a simple affiliate arrangement with a CPA or banker. He could place his links on their sites and give them commission every time someone directed from their site becomes a client of his.

173 there are thousands of affiliate marketers looking for the next big “thing. they love products that are niche-focused, yield a high profit, that they can do seo and ppc for.

174 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC what now?

Now that we’ve discussed the nine ways to get traffic, you’re probably wondering what to do now. How do you choose what to do? How do you implement these strategies? How do you know what is working and how can you improve on what isn’t?

The quest to get traffic to your site is perhaps the biggest challenge you’ll face as a web publisher. Deciding what blend of strategies to use will have to be something that you work through. Every situation varies, but there is a system that you can use to build your traffic plan and begin your process.

1. Make a traffic plan

2. Analyze the data

3. Adjust

Make a Traffic Plan We’ll give examples of traffic plans in the next section of the book, but the first step is to look at the nine ways to get traffic and decide which methods will work for you based on your available time and budget. Many people get stuck at this stage because they don’t want to make a costly mistake. But honestly, there’s no way to know what will work best until you test multiple methods. You just have to make a plan and start working it.

If your plan fails, know that that’s normal. When you fail, just make an adjustment and start again. The key is to keep going. When you get confused, go back to the basic list of nine ways and reset your plan.

Analyze the Data We talked about setting up Google Analytics in the “W” portion of the book. This important step is essential to knowing what is working and what isn’t. Analytics will tell you which pages are getting visited,

175 where the traffi c is coming from, and if that traffi c is fulfi lling your particular goals. Look at the data often and try to learn as much as possible from it.

Adjust Your Approach If Javier is spending a lot of his time on social media talking about his forum and posting content, but very few people are coming to his site from social sources, he should invest his time into something that is working, like off-site content marketing. If Karen the Healthy Food Blogger’s instructional videos are taking up the majority of her time but not providing much traffi c, she could fi nd out about that in Analytics and refocus her time on on-page content or SEO. Use the data in Analytics to gain understanding of where your traffi c is coming from. Bill and Hunter tried to do a massive push on their blog but found that no one wanted to read what they were publishing, so they invested that budget into PPC, where they know they’ll get qualifi ed traffi c to their site.

Your traffi c plan will always be changing. Be fl exible and willing to abandon what isn’t working.

Be Patient People often think that their website should get a lot of traffi c very quickly. It takes time. Be realistic. We always tell people to give any new traffi c plan at least three months to develop before they give up on it. Consistency and patience go a long way on the web.

176 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC TRAFFIC PLANS

In the previous section of WTC, we stipulated that a professional builds their site with the traffi c plan in mind. We’ve just reviewed the nine different methods for getting traffi c online and identifi ed what a few of our WTC Web Marketers might do to implement them. But what do three of our marketers’ complete traffi c plans look like with all nine methods included?

Daryl, the greeting card guy:

Daryl’s Traffi c Plan

CONTENT MARKETING

ON-SITE:

What kind of content will you place on your site? Daryl will make a list of artists who he respects and his visitors might enjoy. He will create a list of links to their work.

Daryl will continue to produce more cards; the more cards he can produce, the better his on-site content marketing will be.

OFF-SITE:

What kind of content will you place on other sites? Daryl will build a list of sites that might like to feature his cards.

Daryl’s wife will send emails to fi nd out whether they’re interested.

177 BLOGGING

CATEGORIES:

What are you going to blog about? Daryl will write a blog post each time he introduces a new card on his website that describes the creative process behind each card.

Daryl’s wife will meet with other artists and feature their work on his blog.

CALENDAR:

How often are you going to blog? Daryl will produce a new card and share it on his blog twice a month.

Once Daryl can step away from his full-time graphic design responsibilities, he will publish once a week.

Daryl’s wife will interview artists once per month.

PROMOTION:

How will you promote your blog content? Daryl will set his CMS (Content Management System) to auto-publish to his social media channels every time he publishes a new blog post.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

CONTENT:

What are you going to share on social media? Daryl will automatically share his blog content to his Facebook page and Twitter profi les.

Daryl will post the work of other artists, particularly the ones his wife plans to interview for the blog.

Daryl will post anything that interests him within the realm of fine art.

178 chapter 4 - TRAFFIC CONNECTION:

Which social networks do you plan to engage with? Who do you plan to connect with on them? Daryl will promote his cards on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.

Daryl will reconnect with artists he already knows.

Daryl will fi nd and join an art industry forum and become actively involved.

CONSISTENCY:

How frequently do you plan to connect with others and share content via your social networks? When? For how long? Daryl will fi nd art and articles to share every Tuesday morning for an hour.

Daryl will also schedule tweets and Facebook posts for the rest of the week at this time.

EMAIL MARKETING

CONTENT:

What kind of content will you share in your email updates? Daryl will share all of his blog content - new cards, interviews with artists, and anywhere that Daryl gets featured due to their off-site content marketing plan.

BUILD LIST:

How do you plan to get visitors to sign up for your email list? When a card is a year old, it will be available for both purchase and download for an email address.

Whenever Daryl sells a new card, there will be a default check box that states that the purchaser will begin to get updates to the website and blog.

179 There will also be a prominently-placed CTA on the homepage that invites site visitors to sign up for updates and specials.

SEO

KEYWORDS & COMPETITION:

Are your keywords identifi able? If so, what are they? Daryl’s keywords include “funny cards” and “funny birthday cards.”

Are your keywords being searched? If so, what is the competition level for your keywords? Daryl’s keywords get a lot of traffic and his keywords are highly competitive.

Daryl does not currently have the budget to pursue these keywords for SEO.

Daryl will do some lightweight branded SEO.

TECHNICAL:

Does Google fi nd your site when you search your URL? Yes, Daryl’s website is found and indexed on Google.

Daryl needs to reduce the fi le size of the card images on their landing page so they will load quickly.

CONTENT:

Are you using your keywords in your