Position your business for today AND tomorrow.
February 19, 2008
A little boy was at the street trying to sell lemonade. His stand was well built, and he had distributed flyers across the neighborhood to let everyone know that if they wanted a refreshing glass of lemonade, his house was the place to get it. It was mid-afternoon now, and the boy had been manning his stand since early that morning, but made no sales.
A few minutes later a neighbor came by, walking his dog. The neighbor was wrapped up in a heavy coat, pulling it tightly to him. Even his dog had a sweater on. The neighbor saw the boy with his lemonade stand and was shocked.
"What are you doing?" the neighbor asked the boy. "It's below freezing!"
"That's true," the young entrepreneur replied, "but in a few months it will be warm, and I'm planning for the future!"
I can't tell you how many webmasters I've heard from who are trying to sell lemonade in the middle of winter. By that I mean that they are trying to out-think Google and build their sites around what Google may or may not do in the future instead of what is known to bring results right now.
Don't get me wrong — you need a long term plan. Without long term goals your business has no direction for growth. But countless webmasters are sacrificing the short term profits that will help them achieve their long term goals by ignoring what works today.
One big example is link building. After my Search Engine Myths Exposed report was launched I read a few blog posts from people saying, basically, 'It might work to get off-theme links now, but at some point Google is going to stop counting them.' Their point was that because Google might take some action in the future, you should ignore the benefits gained from receiving off-theme links today.
It's beside the point that I completely disagree with those who claim that Google will one day ignore off-theme links. The point is that those folks are encouraging people not to do what will help their bottom line today, because they think it won't work tomorrow. Meanwhile, their competition is out-ranking them in Google by getting off-theme links.
Look at it this way: if the creators of the VHS video tape knew that one day the DVD format would come along and blow them out of the water, would it have been a wise decision never to go forward with VHS? Hardly! VHS was the format of choice for well over a decade. Billions of dollars were made with that format before DVD finally did come along as the wave of the future.
Let's extend that even further: Sony's Blu-Ray has officially won the war against Toshiba's HD DVD format. If Blu-Ray eventually replaces DVD, would the creation of the DVD have been a bad idea from the get-go? Of course not! Again, billions of dollars later, it was hardly a bad idea just because the future may turn a different way.
The same thing applies to your business. You want to have long term goals that take into consideration the winds of change, both with search engines and other traffic generation techniques. But you should also have short term goals that exercise the methods known that work right now.
The key word here is "balance." Don't put all of your time into your long term goals and miss out on today's profits, but don't focus so completely on short term methods that, if they ever do stop working, you're dead in the water. Put time into both. This, of course, is much easier once you are at a point where you can outsource the daily grunt work tasks.
You see, the problem with the winds of change is that they are by nature very unpredictable. Who can foresee precisely what will or will not happen next month, or next year, or five years from now? There are far too many variables. Weather forecasters have long since demonstrated that the more variables there are, the less accurate your prognostication will be.
So the best thing you can do as a business is to have more general long term goals: "I want to achieve one million visitors per month to my web site in the next 3 years," or "I want to create a new product in my market each year over the next 5 years." As you get closer and closer to those deadlines, you mold and craft your goals to fit more closely to the actual climate and environment of the time you're in. Meanwhile, the profits from your short term goals are helping to make those long term goals a reality.
Yes, the boy with the lemonade stand would have been better off selling hot chocolate during those cold winter days, and in the evening working to perfect his lemonade recipe, or improve the design of the flyer he intended to use come summer. Had he been selling hot chocolate, he would have had the money he needed to really launch his lemonade business when the time was right. As it is, he'll have exactly what you would expect a person selling lemonade in freezing weather to have: nothing at all.
Please leave your thoughts and comments below.
Work ON your business, not IN it.
February 11, 2008
I once made the mistake of hiring a company that specialized in handling technical support for online businesses. The single person assigned to my (smallish) account at the time was a member of MENSA. She was a true-blue certified genius with a technical background.
Who could ask for more, right? Wrong! The woman turned out to be completely unable to handle the support for my business, and after a couple of months of fighting and hoping for the best, I fired the firm.
From that point on I became a bit of a control freak about my business. I mistakenly assumed that if a certified genius with a technical degree was unable to handle my tech support, that I just needed to give up and do it all myself.
After about 18 months of that I was at the point where 80% of my time was used up handling support requests. My business stopped growing. I was chained down by support requests, stuck working in my business instead of on it.
Not long after that Mike Filsaime asked me to give him a call, which I did. We had a long conversation about outsourcing things like support requests.
Mike laid the bare truth on me in a way that only he can. "Jon," he said, "you have two choices: you can burn yourself out doing everything yourself, or you can hire out and watch your business grow."
"But Mike," I protested, "nobody is going to be able to give my customers the kind of support I can! I created these products."
"That may be true," he replied, "but not even you can do what you do for an endless number of customers without killing yourself. At some point you simply will not be able to handle it."
He was right, too. I was already at the point of wanting to chuck it all because I just couldn't keep up with the support requests the way I wanted to — forget about growing my business!
So I did some hard thinking about what I was going to do. Mike told me that he managed to get a very happy customer of his to do support for one of his products in return for a percentage of the profits. That worked very well because the person was not just an employee, but was actually invested in doing a good job.
I decided to give that a try, and ended up hiring Amin Motin, a very active member at one of the support forums I ran. I had already made him a moderator at the forum because of his freely dispensing so much good advice and support to folks there. It seemed only natural to have him do support for my other products.
Amin is also invested in my business. His "salary" comes from a variety of web sites and services which turn a profit for both of us. And you know what? I was very wrong when I said that nobody could give my customers the same level of support that I was giving them. Amin is better than me, more patient and helpful with my customers, and I've read more praise directed at him than I have room to share here.
After bringing Amin on board I suddenly had a huge amount of time to devote both to personal and business pursuits. My net monthly income has increased 40% because of being free to work on other projects and toy with ideas I'd had in the back of my mind — and this increase has come despite Amin's share of the profits and me working fewer hours than I did before (I devote a lot more time to my personal ministry work now).
You see, I had the wrong outlook on my business. I was so afraid to let go of a piece of my business that I had been burned on before that it was strangling its growth (and stressing myself out beyond belief). I also had the mistaken notion that I couldn't afford to pay somebody to handle the support for me. What Mike helped me to see, and what indeed has proven to be true, is that I couldn't afford not to have someone else doing support.
Now I outsource everything. My site design, graphics and logos, my support, my content creation. You name it. If it can be outsourced, I try a few folks out until I find the one who fits the bill and I stick with them.
Doing this has dramatically increased not only my bottom line, but also my peace of mind. My family and I travel on vacation, and I'm not stuck doing support tickets in the evening while we're away. I don't stress about how support is going to get handled, because Amin is so fantastic at it. I never worry about how my next web site or product is going to look, because the guys at GraphicsGenie.com do such a fantastic job on every product I put up.
You may really not be able to afford to hire out just yet, and that's understandable. I was in that position at first also. But I promise you, I promise you, that as soon as you can make room in your budget to start hiring out the services that you do not absolutely have to handle yourself, you will find your business blossoming into something much greater than you could possibly make it by yourself.
Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.
The SEO Benefits Of An Affiliate Program
January 11, 2008
Don't look so shocked! It's true, affiliate programs can have great search engine optimization benefits.
Now, I know that affiliate programs are often seen as a way to get around needing to do any search engine optimization. I'll be honest with you: for a long time that's how I saw them. "If I have an affiliate program," I thought, "then I don't have to worry about getting ranked in the search engines. All of my traffic will come from the affiliate referrals!"
There is some truth to that. Having an affiliate program for a product that converts well does ensure a steady flow of traffic even if you're not well ranked in the search engines. But if you play your cards right, your affiliate program can do double duty: send a steady stream of referrals from the affiliates and get you ranked for some solid keywords in Google.
Let me explain how this is possible.
How Affiliate Links Help Rank Your Product Page
Most affiliate links use 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is the technical term for a permanent redirect. Basically, a 301 redirect tells the search engine crawlers to count the affiliate link as a link to the final destination rather than the initial link.
For example, your affiliate link might look like this:
http://theproductdomain.com/?id=12345
But it contains a 301 redirect to the home page:
http://theproductdomain.com/
So when Google sees the affiliate link, it's not going to try and rank theproductdomain.com/?id=12345, but will apply the link to the ranking of the final destination instead (in this case the home page).
This also applies when affiliates use 301 redirecting scripts to "cloak" their affiliate links. A large portion of affiliates do this. Instead of using the affiliate link above, they will use a redirect that might look like this:
http://affiliatedomain.com/recommends/yourproduct.php
That script will usually use a 301 redirect to their affiliate link, which then 301 redirects to your site's home page. Google follows both 301s and applies the initial link to the ranking of the final destination (your product sales page). This is also true if the affiliate uses links from cloaking sites like TinyUrl.com or OffTo.net.
To get the maximum benefit from this, you need to make sure that your affiliate program links always redirect to the main product page. For example, a ClickBank affiliate link will result in referrals landing at a page like this:
http://theproductdomain.com/?hop=cbusername
That's not what you want! You want them to land at theproductdomain.com without showing the "hop=cbusername" portion, because Google counts those as two different pages. So you should make sure that the product page will check the url to see if the "hop=cbusername" is there, and if it is, perform a 301 redirect to theproductdomain.com. This will ensure that you get the maximum benefit from the affiliate links aimed at your product site.
If your site uses PHP, you can use an index.php file that looks something like this:
if(isset($_GET["hop"])){
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://theproductdomain.com/");
header("Expires: 0");
exit;
}
else{
readfile("salesletter.html");
exit;
}
?>
Thanks to whitehatcrew.com for the 301 header addition. Can't believe I forgot that!
What this will do is check for the "hop" variable in the query string. If it finds it, it will redirect to the home page instead. If not, it will show salesletter.html (which should contain your product's sales letter). That's an easy way to make sure that ClickBank affiliate links all end up in a 301 redirect to the home page. Don't worry, the ClickBank cookies will all remain in place so that the affiliate gets credit.
A side benefit is that this will make your affiliates happy. In the past I've had many affiliates write in and ask me to remove the "hop=" for my ClickBank products. They don't like to see it there.
Encourage Proper Keyword Usage In The Affiliate Links
As you may already be aware, having the keywords that you want to rank for in the links aimed at your site is incredibly important to rank well for those keywords. So, for example, if you want your product page to rank for "green widgets", it's not going to help you much if all of the affiliate links say "Go to theproductdomain.com now!" or something like that which is completely unrelated to "green widgets."
To encourage the use of "green widgets" in the link anchor text, be sure and provide the HTML code for your affiliates on the affiliate page. A large portion of your affiliates, especially the ones newer to affiliate marketing, will just copy and paste whatever you give them to use right into their web pages and blogs.
To illustrate this, do a search in Google for "search engine myths exposed" "holy grail". As of right now that will return 584 results.
The majority of those results are from people who just copied and pasted the example sales copy that I gave my affiliates to promote my new report, Search Engine Myths Exposed. In this particular instance I did not take my own advice and include the HTML code with the keywords that I wanted to rank for in the example copy (it was really meant for emailing, not posting to a web page). However, it clearly demonstrates that a large number of affiliates will copy and paste whatever you give them to use!
Fortunately for me, many of my affiliates are linking to the report site with the keywords "Search Engine Myths Exposed." This has ensured my #1 position for the phrase in Google.
At first my report did not rank #1 for those keywords. Some of my affiliates were ahead of me, and I was down around #8 in the results. But after I announced the pre-launch and got a swarm of affiliates, my site quickly jumped into first place at Google.
Don't Limit Yourself To Your Product Name
You certainly don't want to limit yourself to rank for the name of your product. Research targeted keywords that will help generate sales. For example, my Instant Article Wizard software currently ranks in the top 10 for the keywords article marketing, which brings in steady traffic and sales direct from Google.
In Summary
Yes, your affiliate program will bring in a steady flow of referrals and sales even if you don't rank well in the search engines, but with a little forethought and extra effort, it can also get you ranked for keywords that will bring generate sales and increase your bottom line!
Please post your thoughts and comments below.
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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