Opportunity Abounds!

I am continually impressed by how the Internet allows small businesses to compete effectively with much larger companies. That characteristic is one of the things that draws me to this field.

I ran across an interesting sentence in a recent edition of The Economist that said, "Only 5% of European Union companies born since 1980 have made it into the list of the 1,000 biggest in the EU by market capitalisation (sic). In America, the figure is 22%."

Most of us in small businesses will never make it to this list, but I am impressed by the large number of companies started in the United States that have made the list. Most businesses don't have the reach to even aspire to this kind of growth, but I am inspired by the thought of the possibility.

One of my posts earlier this year referred to the ease of starting a business on the internet, and that ease certainly contributes something to the startling number of really successful companies compared to the experience in the European Union. Clearly, the environment in the United States is more favorable to start-ups than the environment in the EU, but the internet is definitely a part of that environment.

Never forget, while you are working away on improving the performance of your web site, that the potential rewards for learning to be effective on the web are huge!

Start Your Own Web Business

"It’s always pays to get around like minded people and see what you can learn."

Brian Armstrong is an Internet entrepreneur who maintains an interesting blog that is worth visiting. He has spoken in our clinic int he past and has been invited to return for another session, but, unfortunately for us, he has since moved to Argentina!

His blog is called StartBreakingFree, and it is all about his effort to become independent via his Internet activities. If you are interested in starting a business on the web, you might find a lot of interesting ideas on his site.

I was initially attracted to Brian's blog because he published a series documenting his thirty day effort to increase traffic to his web site. This was a great series because you could follow his thought process day-by-day as he tried different strategies to boost his performance and reported back on whether they worked or not! You can take a look at the "build traffic, get more subscribers, and sell books" strategy series to see if there are ideas that might be helpful to you in your own efforts to improve.

Brian continues to post his experiments on his site, as well as references to other people who are doing interesting things on the web. His site is a great resource for researching topics about internet marketing. When he comes back to the US for a visit, I hope we can get him in to tell us some of his adventures directly.

The New Internet Start-Up Boom: Get Rich Slow

"At no other time in recent history has it been easier or cheaper to start a new kind of company."

If you are thinking about starting a business, here is an article that might give you some good ideas and some inspiration.

Don't get the idea that we are talking about easy money. This is not "easy" for most people. It is hard work and can be lots of work. What you can learn here is that there is lots of opportunity if you can find it, and you can do it for very little money if you are capable of putting everything together.

The article describes the startup of a web site that would summarize car reviews from other sources and rank every model of new car. The creator put it together himself by contracting for development help through various sites on the web. He is not a developer himself. The article provides links to many sites where you can find contract help.

One of the investors quoted in the article says, '"The biggest problem facing any website is distribution." In a world where it's so easy to start a company, how will anyone find yours?' For participants in our free Internet Marketing Clinics, this sounds like an invitation! That is exactly where the skills and techniques we teach can become a competitive advantage to help make your business one of the successful ones.

One other point made in the article is that the cost of failure is low, and that is important because it means you can try lots of ideas in order to find one that works for you. In other words, you might expect that your effort will not succeed, but that does not mean that it was not worth trying. With a low cost of failure, you can go on to try other ideas which might become successful.

My grandfather always told me, "There's more than one way to skin a cat!" (apologies in advance to cat lovers, I never actually skinned a cat, nor intended to!!) So keep that in mind as you start out on your business venture and be prepared to regroup and start over if it doesn't work out. Successful entrepreneurs often have multiple failures before they hit a success. Keep swinging until you connect with the long ball!

Work from Home Opportunities?

Lots of ads and lots of unsolicited email messages offer opportunities to make big incomes while working from home. Most of these are pure junk, but their sheer volume testifies to the interest in the topic. This article describes what appears to be a real opportunity to work from home in a flexible environment where one can make real money.

As you might expect, it does not offer you a chance to become a millionaire, and it involves real work that is monitored and measured. You can't "put something up on the web and watch the money roll in!", as so many ads seem to offer.

On the other hand, you can get a real opportunity to free yourself from a daily commute, work flexible hours at your own discretion, provide a real service, and collect real pay. The better you are, the more you can work and the more you will make. And, you can review your own performance statistics by which you are evaluated!

If this is of interest to you, read the story behind the link in the title of this posting and look in the article for the name "Dawn Linseman". Her story will give you an example of a real opportunity. Keep in mind the statistic cited in the article, "...the company accepts only about 2 percent of all applicants..." This is a competitive situation, but that reflects the real world, not the imaginary one featured in the compelling ads!

The article describes other sites that feature freelance programmers and other contract services that may be of interest to you, either as an applicant or a consumer. You can list yourself as a resource there, or you can look for the kind of support you may need to start your own business.

I am seeing a lot of articles about how people are starting up their own businesses today specifically because of the downturn and the current job market, and I will b eposting more information about some of these in the future. Keep your eyes on this space for more information!

Searching for New Customers in the Recession? - eMarketer

"As marketers better understand the purpose of Website optimization in their overall campaigns, compared with the other three types of search marketing, SEO spending will grow at a higher yearly rate.

“Customers are going to search engines because they are looking for better deals,” says Mr. Hallerman. “And marketers are going to search engines because that’s where the customers are.”"

A research report indicates a new and growing interest in SEO activity on the web.

The article has an interesting chart showing how much money is spent on different types of web marketing. In 2008, expenditures on paid search marketing are about 7 times what is spent on SEO. By 2013, the author expects that ratio to drop to just over 5 to one.

Looking at it in a different light, expenditures on paid marketing will be about 1.8 times the 2008 amounts, while expenditures on SEO will be 2.5 times the 2008 amounts.

His explanation for the faster growth in SEO? As he says in the quote above, better value and "...that’s where the customers are."

What this means to us is that the environment we are working in on the web will be come more and more competitive, making it all the more important that we stay on top of what works in the field!

Click on the title at the top to see the article.

Local Search Improves Your Business!

"You only have to compete with similar businesses in your AREA."

Many businesses are strictly local in their reach and competing on the worldwide web does not contribute much to the bottom line. However, the web is a great source of locally oriented inquiries as well. The important thing is knowing how to reach those locally oriented searchers effectively.

This article from Derek Gehl's newsletter discusses how people search for local services by adding city, state, community or neighborhood-specific terms to more general searches in order to find the businesses or services that are relevant to their needs.

Derek provides a very useful listing of sites where you can submit your site to acquire links that are oriented to your locale. I have incorporated his listing in my spreadsheet of useful links for your convenience.

In addition, Jay recently (April 9, 2008) presented a new technique in our clinic for enhancing your site for local searches. This technique relies upon how Google responds to particular combinations of text and links within your site. Join us twice a month in our free Internet Marketing Class at UH SBDC for regular updates on the best way to make your site into an efficient prospect-gathering tool for your business!

So Does Blogging Really Work? Here's the Proof.

An interesting post provides some insights to using blogs to promote your business. The first part of the posting is all about Dell turning around its attitude to blogging for businesses, and is an interesting story about the impact hat blogging can have on a company. It is not really too relevant to most small businesses except in that it shows that the wrong kind of attention can really hurt you! In most cases, small businesses don't have the visibility for that to be much of an issue. Attention is what they are trying to get!

To me, the more interesting part of this post has to do with the South African winery that took up blogging. If you read the details, they increased their business volume by more than a factor of ten! Yes, I did say ten! They state that they were selling some 40,000 cases of wine per year when they began their blog, and are now approaching 40,000 cases per week. Who would not like this result!

Their efforts in marketing through their blog go well beyond posting information on the blog, but that was the starting point. In their case, they began giving wine away to people on the blog, which is sure to get attention, but, for a tenfold increase in sales, it makes a lot of sense! The lesson here is that by using your blog creatively in your business arena, you can have a huge impact. You can be sure that these people are believers in the power of the Internet to promote business.

For more information about blogging and how to use the Internet effectively, browse some of our presentations that we have made in our free Internet Marketing Clinic at the University of Houston Small business Development Center.

Which elements lead to high Google rankings?

Axandra reported back in a May 2007 newsletter on the results of a ranking study performed by the German firm Sistrix. They include a link to the study report, but, unfortunately for me, that page is in German!

The summary is good, however, and reinforces the lessons that we have consistently promoted in our clinic, with only one new note.

Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

In summary, the importance of these elements follows the order in which they are listed with the exception of inbound links, which are cited as being quite important. As with any such study, it is impossible to assign any specific measure of impact to the different elements. We emphasize understanding the concept of which is more important, and utilizing them all.

The one note that stood out from our general understanding of element significance was that H1 headline tags appeared to show less significance that the effects of tags H2-H6! This point really jumped out at me from the findings, and could be explained by Google continuing to battle the efforts of search engine optimizers.

Underlying all of this information is the understanding of the importance of getting the right keywords in use on the site in the first place! The elements discussed all relate to the proper use and placement of the keyword phrases.

Almost as an aside in the report, there was a mention that sites with very few parameters in the URL appear to rank higher than sites many parameters in the URL. This is interesting, as it is slightly different from the perspective that we have always taken on the structure of the URL, which is that it seems to inhibit the depth of crawl of a site. These are two slightly different perspectives on the issue, but with the same bottom line: complicated, parameter driven URL's don't perform as well!

How the Web Interacts with Brick & Mortar!

"Now, one company is planning 3-D-like tours of Cambridge, Mass., and other cities that not only venture down streets, but also inside some local businesses. Tourists to this virtual Cambridge will be able to click their way along a Brattle Street rendered in realistic detail, and move through the computer-generated interiors of dozens of nearby shops and institutions."

This story is really interesting because it shows how the web is influencing and changing how brick and mortar stores conduct their businesses. If you think about this for just a minute, you realize that prospects on the web no longer even have to visit a store to see the displays and promotions!

The more people can do about their shopping on the web, the better it is for web sites that have effectively built their web sites to respond to searcher interests.

New Google rankings study

"The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results."

Another recent study re-confirms the information that we provide in our weekly free Internet marketing class at the Small Business Development Center in Houston! (We always enjoy getting confirmation of our approach from other authorities!)

The study analyzed the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank. All were found to have an influence on rankings.

While the article did not emphasize this point, it seems relevant to point out the importance of finding and using the right keywords. The study focused on what you do with the words in the construction of the web site in order to gain the most impact, but did not stress the importance of finding and using the right words to begin with.

This might be a harder fact to study and report on, but the importance lies in understanding the thought processes of the people that you are trying to attract to your site. Optimization is a matter of finding the "edge" over your competition in every small way possible and making use of that in constructing your site. Begin by understanding your target audience, then use the information presented in this report to communicate to the search engines in the most effective way!

SEO Site Analysis: Knowing the Score, Part 1

"... prepare a report card for your current Web site. Think of the process as a scorecard of sorts, though the analysis could become a blueprint for any online marketing project.prepare a report card for your current Web site. Think of the process as a scorecard of sorts, though the analysis could become a blueprint for any online marketing project."

The author of this article provides an outline for evaluating the effectiveness of your web site. In the process, she describes, or mentions, many of the points that we regularly stress in our Internet Marketing Clinic in teaching how to create a powerful web site from scratch.

Two of her points that I found particularly interesting were, "If you don't have access to any information about your site, give your site a zero for Web metrics ..." and "... if you site is entirely Flash- or AJAX-based and doesn't produce an alternative site for non-JavaScript users, give your site a zero." She was unequivocal about these points, making it clear how important it is to avoid the mistake of Flash style sites, and how important it is to have statistics that your regularly utilize to understand what is going on with your site.

Some of the evaluation she recommends will require some tools that go beyond site statistics, but she offers some suggestions and links to places where they can be obtained. Some of the analysis may also go beyond the capability of many site owners, but we offer help on those points through our free internet marketing classes.