While those start ups were made by the folk prepared to ‘get on their bikes and do something’ the plan was to hopefully make a weekly wage while today’s internet entrepreneur can realistically hope for and even expect much more in income opportunities.

Sure there is a steep learning curve but anyone with a modicum of intelligence, some time to sit and learn the ropes and a bit of patience can build a successful online business. The skill comes in choosing the correct business to put your efforts into.

Something like this online store selling kitchen stools is most peoples idea of an online business. Unlike its brick and mortar counterpart the online store can be up and running for a few hundred quid and £10 a month running costs. No rent and rates or utility bills for the online business.

Like its brick and mortar counterpart though it has customers to deal with, suppliers to handle, couriers to organise etc. all of which takes time.

A much easier and less time consuming online business is information publishing. You write and publish information on a web site that people want and need and then sell advertising space on the site. This is often the first method people try to make money online, usually through Google’s Adsense program.

The biggest mistake made by those trying this method is that they pick the wrong subjects to write about. Blogging about your life as a secretary is not going to attract high paying advertisers. To get the real money you need to be writing about a subject that will attract readers with high commercial intent.

Probably what most internet entrepreneurs strive for is passive income. Set it up and forget it, just cash the cheques once a month is the dream. Far from being the holy grail of internet marketers though, there are literally tens of thousands of these businesses already online.

All you need is the answer to a problem that a large amount of people have.

At a recent internet marketing seminar I met someone who was 38 and had been living with his parents until 12 months ago. He was a failed musician making ends meet teaching kids how to play guitar when he hit on the idea of creating a digital tutorial and selling it online.

He sells between 70 and 120 units a day at $37 each. The lessons are digital which means the buyer downloads them after purchasing and there is no stock to worry about. Apart from replying to the odd email which his support staff now handle, his $6 figures per month is totally hands off.

These digital products need only be created once and can be sold for as long as there is a market for the problem.

Here’s a successful digital product about identity theft protection which is a huge market in the States at the moment and there are a ton of other examples you can find. Wherever there is a problem an internet entrepreneur is trying to sell the fix.

For every problem solver released though there are thousands that never get past the idea stage. People have the idea but don’t know how to:

• create a digital product
• market it online
• sell it hands free
• deliver it automatically

If you have a fix for a problem you think people would pay for but don’t know where to start, use the contact page to get in touch. If we like your idea we can work on a percentage of profits rather than up front costs to you.

Please avoid at all costs. It is operated by a known scam artist from Birmingham called Shaun Smith.

He claims to provide a system to make money online but its nothing short of worthless and worse, it’s misleading.

While I always advise anyone who asks me not to buy into these type of “make X amount of money in x amount of days” programs, this one is particularly bad.

If you require more details please read Shaun Smith Scam

How do they rank one tweet from another? It seems they base the relevancy of their search results on how many followers the person who made the post on Twitter has. The more followers, the higher the ranking position.

It’s flawed of course but it at least offers an alternative to the ‘real time’ results returned by Twitters built in search engine.

What benefit does being able to search Twitter bring to a company?

For those that don’t know, Twitter is a micro blogging platform. Users get 140 characters to get their point across which means posts tend to be direct and to the point.

It makes sense to search for your company name once or twice a week to find out if customers are raising issues. It’s the way of the world that if you want a testimonial you have to beg or buy it with the offer of a free gift but upset a customer and they will tell anyone who will listen and even many who don’t.

If you offer an offshore service here on the island but you don’t yet have an instantly recognisable brand name, people are going to research your company online before committing.

With Microsoft’s Bing search engine offering Twitter search results it is only a matter of time before Google rolls out an improved version. Within a year people will be searching both Facebook and Twitter for product and service reviews. Getting genuine reviews from genuine customers.

As an example I just did a search for Flybe and there are at least a dozen people twittering live about being stuck in departures delayed. Several people are chatting about a blog post which compares Flybe to Manx Airlines unfavourably and one guy is twittering from the plane moaning about being stuck on the tarmac for over an hour waiting for a take off slot.

Surely it makes sense to have someone replying to these comments, even if its to just apologise or tell them they shouldn’t have a wireless device switched on?

Social commenting is here to stay and companies need to grasp the concept as quickly as possible or they could be left scratching their heads and wondering why custom has suddenly dried up after a spate of complaints pop up all over the blogosphere.

But, once you find a winning combination of keyword and offer, your goal should be to rank number 1 in the Google organic results.

Why pay for SEO though when you can rank number 1 by buying the top PPC spot? The main reason most people cite is the fact that while getting to the top spot of the organic results takes time and might even come with a hefty bill for SEO work, once you get there all your traffic is free.

Another reason often overlooked is the trust factor associated with the top result. It shouldn’t really matter but it does, I’ve experienced it myself many times with various offers.

It may just be a subconscious thing but the fact is no one likes to be sold to and a PPC position is an advert. Google tells its visitors this fact so people know that someone has paid for that ad spot and if they’ve paid there just has to be an offer on the other end of it.

This means before they even click on your ad they are mentally preparing themselves to resist a sales pitch.

Sidebar: One internet marketer tested this theory by selling $50 bills for $10. After 500 clicks he’d sold just 3!

This is one of the reasons you often see a price revealed in the ad. If the price matches the targets price point it relaxes them and lowers their guard before they click plus it helps to keep away the tyre kickers who will click your ad only to fend off the sales pitch no matter how good the offer.

Now compare the above reaction with the mentality of a searcher clicking on the #1 site in the organic results.

The Google user searches for “best offshore bank account on the isle of man” and then Google tells them they believe a particular site to be the users number 1 option. This is a Google recommendation.

Subconsciously the number 1 result already has a head start because the user perceives it to be offering either genuine advice or a genuine offer i.e. it is the best offshore bank account on the Isle of Man.

Does it deserve this trust? Well no not really because the top spot in the organic results can be bought by hiring an SEO expert just the same as you can buy top spot in the PPC ads by outbidding your competition.

The facts are though that click for click your offer will do far better in front of organic traffic than it ever will when advertised via PPC.

Dell’s monetary success though is an exception to the rule, as is being able to measure a social media campaign’s success in hard cold cash.

It’s this lack of quantifiable results that tends to put business off social media yet it is the easiest, cheapest way of creating brand awareness and buzz available today.

Business just needs to realise that unlike a traditional advertising campaign the monetary returns are neither instant nor the main goal.

In 2007 the Isle of man government launched the “Giving You Freedom to Flourish” campaign to communicate the Island’s advantages more effectively to the outside world.

Do a Google search for the term “Giving You Freedom to Flourish” including the quotes and you will get a return of about 186 results. Go to the second page of results (11-20) and Google tells us after the 17th result (it will be 18th now because of this post) that they are omitting the rest of the results as they are very similar to the one’s already shown.

This is Google’s way of punishing those omitted results for having duplicate content. The Isle of man Government probably issued a press release which was posted ‘as is’ by the other 160 sites so Google simply ignores them.

So we have just 17 genuine appearances of the term “Giving You Freedom to Flourish” across the web, none of which are on a social media site.

Where’s the Youtube videos? The Facebook page? The Blogger and Wordpress blogs? Where’s the Wikipedia page and the Wetpaint wiki? The Flickr and Photobucket pages? Where’s the dugg stories, the social bookmarking accounts and the thousand other social media applications that could have been used to create the brand awareness the campaign set out to achieve?

Compare the above campaign with the one promoting the island’s latest export, blues guitarist Davy Knowles. The folk handling him have so far used social media to great effect. They have already created the buzz and they are well on their way to creating the brand.

Do a Google search for “Davy Knowles” (with quotes) and you get a return of 46,900 results. The top 10 includes 7 social media pages including his Twitter, MySpace and Vimeo pages and 2 YouTube videos.

You could argue of course that the comparison is unfair. Music lends itself to social media, Davy is an amazing guitarist, it’s a younger audience etc. etc. All genuine arguments but if the people looking after the promotion of Davy Knowles had simply issued a press release last year and then sat and waited, would he have achieved the fame he’s so far had across in the States?

Not yet he wouldn’t.

If the “Giving You Freedom to Flourish” had set up a social media campaign would it have more than 17 results in Google today?

Absolutely it would.

Things to remember before starting a social media campaign.

Social media site users are brutally honest. If your product or service doesn’t do what you claim it to do, they are quick to tell the rest of the group. Listen to what they say and take appropriate action.

Social media can take on a life of it’s own. Sites have been known to crash because hundreds of people are digging a story on the site. A few hundred Diggs can result in tens of thousands of hits within an hour.

For SEO purposes social media is a great natural link builder (Davyknowles.com already has a Google page rank of 5) and your main web site benefits from all that Google attention.

Consider a social media campaign rather than a standard link building campaign if one of your goals is brand awareness or a product launch.

You need to put the work in and stick with it.

Use the contact page by clicking here to contact us about setting up and managing a social media campaign for you.

Google loves blogs because they (should) update often and the content is constantly changing thanks to the built in interactivity features. If your corporate web site is stagnent, adding a blog can breathe life back into your online endeviours by attracting both Google’s spiders and more potential customers.

The other major advantage of having a blog is that you can write about the latest news within your industry and attract the people searching for that news, something a corporate static web site cannot do.

An Isle of Man investment company for example would have it’s static corporate web site optimised for phrases such as ‘isle of man investment’ and ‘isle of man offshore investment.’

A blog about investing though has unlimited possibilities for keyword targeting. Posts about the pitfalls of property investment, UK’s tax laws, mainland bank interest rates etc. would all attract visitors who could potentially be turned into a client for the Isle of Man investment company which is running the blog.

Optimising Your Blog

Entire books are available on the subject and it’s beyond the scale of this article BUT at the very minimum you should install the excellent ‘All in One SEO plugin‘ and change the permalink structure to day and name.

Optimising Your Posts

There are two methods of writing blog posts. You can either:

Write the article on a hot industry topic first and then read several times before deciding on a phrase the article would best be suited to target and then go through it again making the relevant changes.

Or you can pick a keyword phrase and write the article to fit.

As a rule of thumb the targeted phrase should always be in the title, in the first sentence, once or twice in the body (based on a 400 word article) and once more in the last paragraph.

Keep your posting regular. If you post 3 times a week for 2 months don’t suddenly post 3 a day for a week.

Keep it strictly focused on your industry. Unless your market is the travel industry the CEO’s holiday snaps or a moan about the cost of getting to and from the Isle of Man are best left to your Facebook wall.

We can set up and optimise your corporate blog for you. We can even post to your blog every day for you with a search engine optimised article written by a professional copywriter.

Check out what we can do for your corporate blog by clicking here.

If you are selling online then this isn’t a problem – Your website sells a product that makes you £50 profit and you make A sale every 100 visitors so you know  each visitor you can get to your site is worth 50p.

If it’s leads you are after then it can be slightly harder to work out. Let’s say you are lucky enough to own an isle of Man estate agents so you are after telephone leads. How do you know where they got your number from if you are advertising through various mediums?

You will already know the value of a lead so the easiest way is to set up an 0800 number exclusively used on your website. That way you know each lead that comes in from that number is a direct result of your SEO endeveours.

How much is a Google number 1 position worth to your business?

Staying with the isle of man estate agent as an example, Google tells me last month there were 8100 searches for the term “isle of man estate agents.”

For various reasons the top positioned result can expect 42.1% of that traffic to visit their site. Other searchers will click on a PPC ad, others may be looking for a particular company so browse down the results etc.

Using the industry recognised figures above we can see that the top position would get 113 clicks per day while 4th position gets just 16 clicks per day.

Getting a lead is far easier than making a sale online but even if we assume the islands estate agents sites only convert at 10% then number 1 is getting 79 leads a week while just 3 places down the company in 4th place is only generating 11 leads a week.

If the estate agents convert leads into sales at a rate of 1% then the number 1 spot is worth 41 extra house sales per year where as the number 4 position in Google is worth just 5.7 sales per year.

As you can see, the differences between a top position and even 4th are huge in terms of both traffic and profit.

Why not request your free custom report and we’ll take a look at your competition, your site and your market and let you know exactly what SEO can do for your business.

Click here to request your report today.

It’s search engine results are considered to be the best available and Google soon realised that if it were to continue it’s domination it had to make sure the PPC ads it showed as a supplement to it’s search results also returned good results for its users.

The logic behind this is that many of Google’s users do not differentiate between a PPC ad and the actual search results so if people didn’t find what they were expecting when they clicked on an ad they would soon abandon Google for one of it’s competitors.

Relevancy

The driving force behind the Google quality score is relevancy. Each keyword you bid on needs an ad that has the term within it and then the landing page the user is sent to once he clicks your ad should be optimised for the term.

Not surprisingly, when done correctly this also results in a higher conversion rate because the visitor had a word or phrase in mind when they visited Google and typed it in. They then spotted an ad with the exact same term, clicked it and landed on a page with the term across the top of the page in big bold letters as well as sprinkled throughout the text as they read the sales letter.

Don’t follow the relevancy rules and Google simply slaps you with a high cost per click, follow it closely and they reward you with lower costs and higher positions.

Click Thru Rate

Google also takes into account your click thru rate, that is the percentage of users who click on your ad. The more folk that click your ad, the less you have to pay per click.

How does that make sense? Someone running an ad costing £2 per click that never gets clicked on makes Google nothing, your ad costing 25p per click that gets clicked 200 times a day makes Google £50.

Google rewards you with a lower CPC and punishes the ad that gets no clicks by raising it’s costs further to encourage (force) the ad owner to increase relevancy and improve performance.

Those who don’t ‘get’ the rules usually abandon Adwords at this point claiming it’s too expensive.

There are ways you can use the click thru rate rules to your advantage. By setting your initial bid as very high you are guaranteeing your ad is shown in the top spot.

If you have compelling ads and you are constantly split testing them for performance you should get a high click thru rate. After a few days you can start lowering your bids a little each day while still keeping a top spot.

The Google quality score is the reason why so many give up so quickly and consider PPC as too risky a business model.

Avoiding falling victim to a bad Google quality score requires a very good understanding of Google’s rules, many of which are unwritten.

Constantly monitoring your ads performances, ensuring relevancy between keywords, ads and landing pages for hundreds, sometimes thousands of terms requires a skill best not learnt on the fly.

We can set up and manage your PPC campaign for you and make sure you get and maintain a top quality score. This equates to lower costs and bigger profit margins for your business.

Click here to see our services.