Know Your Target Audience

Here in Bangkok there are 2 English language daily newspapers: The Nation and The Bangkok Post, along with 10 or so Thai language newspapers.

Every day I see Thai language adverts in the English newspapers and see companies advertising for Thai staff in the English newspapers. Why waste the money?

Sometimes it can be harder than others to understand your target audience. However, knowing what your target audience reads, especially knowing their native language, should be an easy one.

I also see this mistake online with webmasters not targeting the right keywords, or any keywords at all! You may think you know what people are searching for to find your product. However, there will be many more variations and completely different words you haven’t thought of.

Carrying out keyword research allows you to analyse the statistics for each keyword, including how many times people are searching for each keyword in Yahoo and Google, along with the amount of competition there is and the keyword competitiveness.

With any promotion, understand your target audience.

Domain Name Addiction

My wife is addicted to shopping, my daughter is addicted to chocolate and my friend is addicted to old cars. I’m addicted to domain names. I currently own over 300 domains, I would say at least 20 are highly valuable.

How do you stop a domain name addiction?

Simple, turn the domain names into a commodity. If the domain names are generating you income, you can keep the addition without feeling guilty.

Either start developing the domain names into the ideas you had when you bought them, I appreciate this is easier said than done! Alternatively, you can go the same route I did and create Adsense sites. They don’t make big bucks, but if done properly they should provide you with a) enough money to cover the renewal fees and b) a good indication on what domains to develop from analysing the site’s stats.

On average it took me 4 hours to create an Adsense site for the majority of my domains, which I dedicated to my Sunday mornings for a year.

Hour one - Research Keywords (find those niche keywords that have searches with no competition. Keyword Tracker is great for this using their KEI formula) Collect images, copy and links.

Hour two - Content - Write the content in your own words making sure you add the keywords to the copy once or twice.

Hour three - Add content and Adsense to a simple template and carry out on-page SEO from your keyword research.

Hour four - Upload the site to the server, set up an email account and set up Google Analytics.

Here are 5 benefits to creating a site early on with your domain names rather than just letting them get cold sitting with your domain register:

1) Providing you add some good content to each site, you should generate enough income via Adsense or affiliate programmes to pay the renewal fees.

2) If the onpage SEO and content is good, other sites that link to you may get your site climbing the search engine rankings generating more traffic/revenue.

3) It’s a lot easier to sell a domain name with an established site on it. If the site is listed in the search engines, with links, you will see a nice ROI.

4) You can monitor each site to see what sites are proving popular. Build the sites that are getting the most links/traffic and you could see a nice return.

5) Keeping busy developing sites will not give you enough time to search for other domain names!

How many domain names do you own? Have you got a domain name addiction?

4 Link Buying Tips

Link building, an essential strategy to an internet marketing campaign, can be one of the most tricky tasks. Why will a webmaster link to you? Do you submit your site to 800 directories? Do you buy links to climb the search engine rankings? Do you buy links/banner advertising for traffic?

There are 3 different types of links:

1) Organic - sites that link to you due to your good content
2) Manual - searching for sites that will list yours for free, including directories.
3) Link Advertising - buying links on sites or in Directories to help with a) targeted traffic and b) search engine rankings.

Today I want to discuss what you need to look out for when buying a text link (link advertising). Google respects your site more when sites in your niche link to you, but why would they want to do that? They would prefer a reciprocal link exchange - you place a link on your site and they’ll return the favour.  Although reciprocal links are great for traffic, they are not as powerful as one-way links to climb the search engine rankings at Google.

It’s a tricky situation. However, there is a solution: buy link advertising on sites within your niche.

Here are 4 excellent tips on what to look for when buying links:

1) Age of Domain - How long has the site been online? Google respects sites that are older, and are updated on a regular basis, compared to a month old site.
2) Is the site indexed in Google?  Type the domain in Google’s search box to see if the site is listed. If not listed, forget the link advertising opportunity.
3) When did Google last crawl the site? Visit the cache page on the site listing in Google’s search results. If Google hasn’t crawled the site is a few weeks, Google thinks the site is not worth re-visiting due to lack of updates. A site that Google visits regularly is a site that’s worth advertising on.
4) How many back links does the site have? This is the most important aspect: The more back links the site has, the more trust Google will give. Type link:

http://www.examplesite.com - site:www.examplesite.com

into Yahoo to find the number of back links. This command will remove any links that are within the domain using site:

Did you notice one variable I do not take into account when measuring the quality of a link? Page Rank.

Good luck!

10 Questions You Need to Ask Any SEO (Before Working With Them)

More and more business owners are turning to the internet as a route to market their product or service. As a result, businesses are in need of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation/Optmiser) services to help with generating targeted traffic and a strong online presence.

As with any industry, there are SEO’s that are worth every $ and there are many that are just interested in your money.

In order for you not to get burned if you decide to seek an SEO, here are 10 excellent tips on how to determine whether a SEO is worthy or not:

1) Ask what in-house sites they promote and where they rank in Yahoo and Google for which keyword terms. Any SEO who knows their stuff will have their own portfolio of sites. If they don’t, this is immediately a red flag.

2) Check their sites by typing the keyword(s) in each search engine, take note of the amount of results/competition (In Google, you will see the amount of results in the top right hand corner of the search results) In general, the higher amount of searches, the more difficult it is to reach to the top. Above 50,000,000 search results is a good sign.

3) Ask the SEO why they want to work on client’s sites rather than his own. Do they want to gain more experience within different industries or don’t they like the commitment of working on their own sites?

4) Find out what techniques they use to generate inbound links - Manual or Organic? Anyone can manually build inbound links (there’s nothing wrong with this technique). However, a good SEO will concentrate more of their efforts on generating organic links via quality content, social media/book marking sites. Find out what ideas they have for your site. Ask to look at their previous link building strategies and results.

5) The simple marketing test: If you have a set of links in your navigation bar, ask them their thoughts on what order they should be in and why. This will show if the SEO puts the end-user experience first, and you will also see some of their marketing thoughts and styles.

6) Find out exactly what you get for your money and the time lines they will be delivered in. Will the SEO work on a performance basis?

7) If possible, try to arrange a face-to-face meeting or at least a telephone conversation. Do they sound enthusiastic about SEO, online marketing? Have they got good ideas that will help grow your online business? Do your personalities match?

Ask how many other clients they’re currently working with, how many staff they have (if any). This will give you a good indication if theywill be able to put the required level of commitment/effort into your project.

9) Are their rates to low? This may sound crazy, but any SEO worth their weight in gold will not offer rates lower than what they can generate by promoting their own portfolio of sites. Why would he?

10) Ask the above 9 questions to at least 3 SEO’s, more if time permits. You will get a good feel on what SEO’s can add value to your business from the questions above.

I hope the above will prevent you selecting an SEO that is just out to make a quick buck from inexperienced webmasters.

Good luck!

Video on WordPress / Duplicate Content

This is a great video regarding how to avoid duplicate content when using Word Press.

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