Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

Getting people to any site is a challenge, even more so to a new one. Until your SEO kicks in (and even when it has) and delivers organic search traffic, you need to rely on other methods to get people’s attention.

There are 3 (almost) free tips I can recommend to drive traffic to your site and begin to build awareness (and hopefully quality links).

Blog, and Make Your Content Topical and Current

I am a big believer in blogging, regardless of your niche. Somewhere on your site, you should make room for a blog and write on it regularly. You may think that your insights into your field may not mean much, but to an audience that is coming to your site to know about your product, they may find it useful. And it is a way of actively generating content to a site that may not be otherwise be visited by a potential customer.  Read more...

I’m just back from the first Affili@SYD conference, and wanted to share what I considered some of the highlights and point you in their direction, as I think there was some incredibly valuable content that anyone starting an online business should know.

The keynote was from Jay Berkowitz, the CEO of www.tengoldenrules.com, and was certainly one of the most engaging presentations I have heard on online and affiliate marketing. Jay spoke on 10 Super Success Strategies for Internet marketers, which covered effective SEO, blog building and the importance of personal brand and what tools you can use to build it. One such site was PeoplePond, which allows you to aggregate all of your online presences and manage your reputation, something I will be covering in depth soon. Jay’s advice is incredibly practical, I recommend checking out his site TenGoldenRules.com  Read more...

So now that you have considered your keywords, the other part of the SEO puzzle is inbound links and fresh content.

Put simply, inbound links are those that point to your site from elsewhere on the web. It may be from a directory, it may be from a link that someone has added to a social bookmarking site, or someone may consider your site of enough value to link from theirs. Wherever they come from, inbound links are vital to the success of your site.  Read more...

I thought I would cover off the elements of SEO in a little more depth after the primer earlier this week. As I mentioned in the Basics of SEO, the first element of your site that is considered by search engines is Keywords. Keywords are the search terms that people punch into Google (or another search engine) in order to find what they are looking for.

What you need to consider, particularly as a  startup, is that people don’t search for the name of your site because in the beginning, you have no profile or awareness. What they search for is a term that they consider to be the right one for what they are looking for, which doesn’t always match with what you believe they would search for to find your site. What this means is that you will need to conduct some keyword research in order to determine what is best for your market.  Read more...

When a company name becomes a verb, you know it has a pretty significant impact. Anyone who has ever searched for anything online has no doubt used Google at one time or another. The online behemoth, whose homepage is arguably the most valuable piece of online real estate,  has the lions share of  the global search market, making it one of the most important areas of online business for anyone – after all, if they can’t find you, how do they buy from you? Did you know that 55% of purchases here in Australia come from the search engines?

Assuming that you have used it yourself to find something, how many times do you go past the first few pages of results (apparently 93% of people don’t), or click on the sponsored listings on the right hand side and top of the page (called Ad Words, which we will cover in another post)? The sites that appear at the top, and indeed on the first page, are not there by chance. They have employed what is known as SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation.  Read more...