Super Search Engine Marketing

In this section I will deal with various different techniques used to make money and also how you can get paid.

There are a number of ways to make money off your website.  Direct sales of your product, sales of your content, registration fees, subscription fees, advertisments.  In here I will try to describe various ways of making money off your website and maximizing your profits vs your investment.

Then there is how do you get paid? There are a number of solutions from setting up a merchant account with a bank to using pay pal or having people mailing you a check.  I will try to give you various ideas on how to best get paid for the service your providing with your website.

The whole idea is making money off the net. Well if your gonna try to make money you need to have a way to generate income and get paid.  In here I am going to go through various different ways you can get paid depending on where your generating your revenue.  Google, Yahoo, MSN ads on your site mean you get paid one way, sales of product or other means of selling your content means getting paid another.  What is the best way? Depends on what your selling and how your customers feel about paying for what your offering.

So read on as I try to explain the various advantages and disadvantages of using various different methods, the costs vs the benefits.  As always feel free to register here and leave a comment if you have a question.

Sparky

So, you have your website idea, you know what your going to offer, now lets think about how your going to generate revenue from your site.

Hard Goods: Obviously if your selling a product you want someone to make the purchase.  If you have followed along with the various general concepts, website concepts your site is full of CONTENT that makes visitors feel that your offering the best thing since sliced bread.  Selling things will be easy if you get traffic to your site.  Getting Traffic to your site will be discussed in the SEO, SEM, SERP, and General Internet marketing techniques.  But if you have hard goods that your selling on your site, the sales pitch on your site should sell the product.

Soft Goods: If your offering soft goods on your site generating revenue can be done in a couple of different ways and or both ways.  One is to use like I do here and have ads from Google, Yahoo, or other ad service put ads on your site that when people click on it you get a commission on the click.  These are Pay Per Click ads and they will be discussed further here in this section.  Then there is pay per inclusion types of ads these are advertisers that are paying you directly for either links or for graphics with links to their sites.  These are usually more profitable, but both are valuable to generating revenue.  The amount of clicks you get depends again on how many people visit your site.  Another way, that is used less is the pay per view, much like Pay Per View TV people have to subscribe and pay a fee to view the site.  This works if you have the right kind of site, generally an adult site is something people are willing to pay to view.  The more visitors, the more clicks, the more you can charge for direct ads on your site.

Attracting Visitors is the key and that is what this site is really all about.  Getting you set up so that you start to get visitors and customers as quickly as you can.

Sparky.

Your selling a product that is a physical thing.  How do you get paid? There are a number of ways to get paid for product before you ship it.

One way is to get a bank account with a Merchant Account so that you can take and process credit card orders.  Generally with most banks they have interfaces that allow customers through a secure server to make a purchase.  There are some drawbacks to this method. One is that the banks charge fees for this service and with internet based businesses they tend to charge more due to the credit card fraud that occurs on a regular basis.  Some of these fees include monthly account fees, fees on the purchase, fees on deposits, it can zap a start up business with lots of expenses while your waiting for your first sale.

The other is to use one of the many others out there that are offering this kind of service.  You will notice a link of interest which takes you to one of the most used and trusted payment collection methods Pay Pal.  Originally developed so that they could harvest money from E-bay sales they have expanded to cover almost any form of payment and credit card on the face of the earth.  They do charge a fee, but only when money is transferred into your account, and transfers out to your bank account are free and secure.  Pay Pal for all intensive purposes is a bank and needs to use the types of encryption that banks use to process transactions.  This makes payments secure without the need for a secure server or interface. Pay Pal also offers a variety of other services including dispute resolution between a buyer and a seller.  Keeping accurate shipping records is key to dispute resolution with Pay Pal.  The other thing that is nice about Pay Pal is that they are well known and well trusted by people so convincing them that their information is secure is simple to do.

You can also take checks, money orders and direct payments.  These methods for the net are not generally used except for those that fear putting their credit card info on the net.  The net functions for the most part on IMPULSE sales.  People are interested and they buy, instant payment with a credit card is the norm.  Just be sure that the checks clear before you ship the product that is ordered.  If the check is drawn on a US bank that is generally 3-5 days so a simple page that explains payment options and that checks are held till cleared is a simple task.

Those are the basic ways of getting paid for your hard goods.

Sparky

When your selling soft goods you can use the same techniques used for hard goods.  The only thing is that you should push is an instant purchase (subscription) type of method.  This would be like a credit card or my favorite Pay Pal.

When your selling a soft good, you have your customer already locked in. They are ready to view your content or get your information NOW.  People by general nature are very impulse orientated. Even in standard stores impulse sales make up for a greater sale and EVERYONE falls for it.  Just ask yourself how many times you went into a store after a particular item and walked out with other things.  The other things you bought on an impulse.

Soft goods are by nature very much impulse sales. People have found your site and now they want to buy, not tomorrow, not in an hour, they want to Buy NOW and you have to be able to take advantage of that.  The only real way to accomplish the sale is to have some sort of method that they can pay and get access right now.  This means using and instant payment method be involved, along with instant access to the product.

Pay Pal is one of the best ways to do this. People can click the link fill in their info and instantly have access to the content through what Pay Pal uses as a re-direct after the purchase back to your site.  This way you get the sale right away and they get what their impulse at the moment says they want.

Selling soft goods and getting paid for them is just as easy as selling hard goods.

Sparky

One of the eaisest ways to make money off any site is through the use of advertisments on your site. I am sure many of you have profiles on Myspace, Tagged, or visit other sites and you see, like this one, ads from google or other types of ads.  This is how these places are able to let you do what you do for free. They count on you clicking an ad which they charge a fee to the advertiser for the click.

You can take advantage of this in several ways. Google, MSN, Yahoo, and other search engines and even an ever growing market of companies that sell advertising for sites you can get a commission for each of those clicks.

Even if you have a hard goods website the use of ads from the ad companies on your site can increase your revenue. Most of the big ad companies have various different ways that they display ads.   In the example of Google you can use a content form (where google reads your site, sees words in the pages and then puts ads up that are similar to your content), and then refine it so that you get the kinds of ads on your site that you think your visitors will be interested in.

Most all of these companies require that you register with them and then they give you a bit of code or allow you to generate code that is included in your site which calls up the ads from their server.  In the registration process will be a way for them to send you a payment. The key is using a known company to put your ads up for you or if your site is really popular you hitting the net and finding companies that might advertise on your site.  Obviously it is easier to use something like Google to display your ads as you can be pretty sure they are gonna be around for a while and they also allow you to look at what your clicks are, and how much money your making off of them.

Many wonder why would you put ads for other companies that are selling similar products to what you offer on your site?  Simple, most people who run ads are either very big companies with lots of money to spend on ads, or they are new to the net and looking to get people to their sites.  These are people with money to give you for forwarding someone to their site, not that they will buy from them, but you get paid for the click to their site.

Sparky

Check Stub from Google for Ad-Clicks on my sites

OK, so you have decided on a “product” your going to offer people.  The next step is market research.  Luckily with the internet and internet based businesses the vast majority of your competition is already on the net.  So search for what your going to offer.

Now there are good ways to get search results and there are bad ways.  In most the search engines if you search for a term without quote marks you get results that are different than those with quote marks.  Suggest you try searching both ways and see what kind of results you get from the various search Engines that are out there.  Your looking for the number of similar businesses or competition to your products.  In the case of my Gourmet Coffee site there are MILLIONS of sites that I am competing against.   1.95 MILLION at last check for the search term Gourmet Coffee.  However my main product line is Flavored Coffee so when a search for that is done it comes up with only Half a Million or 25% of the Gourmet Coffee search.  Thus I have focused my Coffee site to really push the flavored coffees, adding new ones and making sure that part of my site is always updating with new things.

Now that you have an idea of the numbers of competitors you are facing it’s time to look at what they are offering.  Check some of the sites that come up in the results, not just the first one (though for reasons to be discussed later and in other areas look carefully and bookmark the top 5 so you can go back to them later).  You now need to decide is your product going to be able to compete against the competition?  Can you offer a better price?  Can you offer more information? In the case of Blog sites, can you be more entertaining, informative, or a better writer?

DECISION TIME..  Do you go forward? That is a question only you can answer, but you should not be diswaded by the number or quality of the other competitors, mearly have the confidence that you will take some part of the market share that is out there, or create more market share by virtue of your surpassing them in your marketing of your “product”.

Even with Millions of competitors out there, and more growing everyday, doesn’t mean you can not make money off a “product”.  The key to any successful company is how well they are able to market their products vs the competition and the costs of doing business.  Obviously the fewer the number of competitors there are, the better your chances of becoming tops in search results for search terms, but that should not be the only factor going into your decision.

More to come keep watching.

Sparky

You do not need to have hard goods to sell or make money off the internet. There are what I like to call soft goods, which are not physical objects.  What your looking at now is what I call a soft good.  Blogs, Podcasts, Pictures, anything that can be transmitted in an electronic format is a soft good.

So what do you have that would be of interest to people that they might be willing to pay for in one form or another? There are so many directions you can go here it boggels the mind.  From something like an advice site about what ever you can offer advice, an online community of people, a blog about your thoughts about the day, you would be surprised the kinds of soft goods that are making people lots of money off the internet.  Actually there was a person who had a site that sold PIXELS… (pixels are the little tiny dots that make up the stuff you see on your computer screen).  For a Buck a pixel you could buy pixels on his page. Now you have to realize that on the average computer there are 1024 pixels wide and 760 pixels tall.  That comes out to 778,000 + pixels at $1 each. 3/4′s of a million dollars were available on his page.  Most pictures are better than 200 pixels wide by around 200 tall, that is 4o,000 pixels or $40,000.  Company’s were paying to place their logo on the site as an advertising expense.  The person made lots of money as they got exposure on the network news and became rich.

Nothing is TOO STUPID, STRANGE, OR IDIOTIC that you will not find an audience. Many blogs thrive on doing the insane.  Take a look at the Onion.  They make money making up stuff, same for the Inquirer and other Rag Mags as I call them.  YOU CAN DO THE SAME if that is what you want to do.

If your going to go with soft goods then you need to be knowledgable in a particular subject or not. Look at the popularity of Poltical Blogs.  Do any of these people have any special training in politics?  Some yea, most no but they all have readers that come there day after day to read what it is the person has to say.  They either are their because they agree with you, or they want to see what kind of crazy nonsense you might be spouting today. People on the net find it entertaining and also for information, if you can do one or the other you can have a soft goods site, like this one.

As with all sites soft goods sites need to have CONTENT (have I mentioned how Content is KING? yea I think so), and if your lucky you might find through the market research you do that you might have few competitors out there or millions in any case there is always room for one more.

The way you turn that into money is through the use of google, yahoo, msn, or other types of pay per click or pay per show ads. Some sites like this one, use ads generated by the content on the page.  You may notice that ads are different on different pages, that is how those kinds of ads work and we will discuss that in more advanced parts of this site.  The other kinds of ads are ones that people or companies pay to have on your site.  These can be just a simple link to graphic images and much more.  If you go to a site where you see ads at the top, that is why the site is free.  Someone somewhere is paying the bills.
Sparky

In this section we will focus on the many kinds of things you can do to enhance your site to the top level.

Before you try to understand the posts in this section you will need to understand the concepts and terms used in the other posts in the other categories. So please take time to refresh yourself with the information provided in the General Concepts, SEM, SERP before advancing to the advanced tips on how to market your site on the internet.

In this section I will be using terms like SERP, SEM, Links Marketing, SEO and other shortcut words that you will learn in the other areas of this site.  It is important that if your going to advance to this section that you first fully understand these terms and how they are used. So that you will not wonder what it is that I am talking about when I mention something like “through links marketing you will not only increase your SERP, SEM, and SEO of your site and have a higher PR than your competition.” Unless you understand what the shortcut words I use mean, you will have no clue how to understand what it is that I am going to provide you here in this section.

So again I urge you not to start reading this section unless you already have read the rest of the information I have provided, or already understand what most of these sorts of terms mean go back and start with the begining.  We are getting into the technical sides of how to make your site rank at the top of the search engines for the terms and words that relate to your site and also how to use other sites to increase your sites presence on the internet.

Sparky

Google itself offers up vast amounts of information on how it works, what it looks for and what it dislikes.  While they do not give away all their secrets, they have a patent on how they provide searches, they do lead you in the right directions.

According to Google they consider themselves as “an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (“served”) to you.”

But how do they do this? Google says that this is accomplished with three things.  Crawling, Indexing and Serving.

Crawling is what their spider does. It “is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.“  They use large banks of computers around the world to constantly monitor the web.  If the stats from some of the sites I monitor are any indication, google bots are very active little creatures.  I have sites that google visits on average of 40-50 times per day with peaks of 300 visits per day.

As the google bot goes from one site to another it indexes changes, dead links, and new links, the links it follows around and sees where it takes them. It looks at information submitted for google to search by webmasters, like myself, such as sitemaps and other files placed in websites to direct its bot around to better index the site.

Google says that they do not use the influence of it’s ad generating side of the business to affect search results. There is no evidence of that this is true or not so we kind of have to take them for their word for it.  However search results on Google if you haven’t noticed are surrounded by ads so you can pay to get on the first page, if you have enough money.  I will talk about paying for advertising on the net in another article.

Next is the indexing of the pages. Google bots read the pages and catalogs the words it reads on pages and where they are located at in the page.  Quoting from Google 101 “In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.”

Next is serving up the information when someone does a search. According to Google they look at what the “querry” is and through the use of over 200 things they determine what it is that they are looking for and offer up search results.  One of the things they do note right away is they look at links coming into your site. “PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages.”  adding “each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank“.  Thus the importance of links from other sites.

Sparky

This section is for me to produce a dictionary of a sorts of the various terms I use in this site.

As I use new terms, or make them up, I will make an addition here, so that you will be able to follow along and understand what the terms mean.  With this information you will be able to further enhance your site by being able to use the information I am presenting to you to market your site to its fullest.

There are going to be many terms that will be explained here.  It is very important that you fully understand how they are used and the context in which they are used so that you will be able to take advantage of the information presented here.

I hope that I will be able to fully explain the terms here so that you will understand them.  Once you have the terms understood, you will be one step ahead of the majority of your competition and able to further market your website and achieve success in your venture into the internet.

If you have any questions please feel free to comment on the particular item you wish clarification on and I will be sure to make a followup to help further explain the term or concept.  I will try my best to put these terms into as plain language as I can so that it will be easy for you to understand the definition of the term, how it is used.

Sparky

SERP = Search Engine Rank / Position.  This is where you actually show up in the search results for various words or terms used to search for and find your site.   This is something no one has real control over as each SE has its own way of ranking sites when someone searchs.  Search Results are also very fluid.  You can be top position one second and the next be #10 as the fluidity of the net alters your search results.

Sometimes your SERP is due to an error in your site or a change in that of your competitor.  SERP errors can be discovered and fixed if they are within your own site.  If they happen to be because of significant changes in the other sites all competing for the same search there is not much you can do other than make significant changes or additions to your site.

SERP can be affected by all kinds of things.  The first and foremost is the code used to make your site.  If your W3C complaint in the code of your site then your good to go there.  You can look at how the SE’s see your site.  There are a number of ways to do this.  One of the simpelest is to click within your page and do a select all and copy.  Then past that text into a NOTEPAD document and it will show you how the SE’s see your site.  The text and content is read just like what you see there.  If it makes sense to you then it makes sense to the SE’s.  If you site is coded so that your content shows at the top part of the page and reads properly then its time to look at the content and how often it changes.  The SE’s notice how often your site changes.  Everytime something changes, the SE’s take notice.  The addition of materials to your site on a regular basis shows the SE’s that your site is growing and thus becoming more important as a search result which increases your SERP.

Sparky

SEO = Search Engine Optimization.  This is a process of making a website more visible to search engines.  This process can include a variety of things from Site Code, Site Lay Out, Site Maps, Robots Files, and other things that make it easier for the SE’s to crawl and index your site.

The process of SEO is something that is continually changing as SE’s continue to change and update the formula they use to produce results when people search for something.  A site that is SEO’ed properly and uses as many of the techniques as can will rank higher in the Search Results than other sites.

Most SEO is done at the begining development and construction of the website.  A good webmaster will know all the code that is necessary and that which is obsolete so that your site is seen well by the Search Engines.  Parts of SEO also include CONTENT, which as I have stated is KING to a website.  Well worded copy along with proper coding to meet the W3C standards for the web help with your sites SEO.

Other factors include the number of inbound links, the ability of site crawlers to index your pages, the use of various files and tools through the SE’s to help get your site indexed and reads properly to a SE Spider.

In this section I will present information to you about the basics of design and other elements needed for a website on the internet.

In this section I will explain the need for various types of things in order for your Site to get a high SERP, be Properly SEO’ed.

There are many things that go into the design and operation of a website that can get you higher in the search engines quicker.  There are many dangers to also avoid that can get you banned from the search engines, which unfortunately is very difficult to overcome.  You can plead with the computers at Google all you want, your not likely to get to a real person unless you know someone who works there.

There are many different elements which need to be considered when designing your website.  What your products are, what kinds of customers your looking for, eye candy as I like to call it (curb/store front appeal in bricks and mortar stores), and many other things that you can do that will attract customers to your site, and the search engines as well.

The design of your site not only the look for your customers but the elements it contains for the search engines.  Your marketing to two groups, one your customers are more stable, the other the search engines are not.

It is things like this that I will further discuss in this section of this site.  If you have any questions about the terms I use be sure to check the terms dictionary as I try to explain the various things.  Many times I will take a term and make a link to it in the Terms Dictionary as I did earlier for SEO and SERP.

Sparky

Search Engine Marketing, SEM for short.  This section of this site will give you various hints and tips on how to use the search engines to your advantage.

Being on the net consists of a number of areas in which you can market and expand your business.  One of the most focused on is the Search Engines, show up on the first, second or third page and your popular and visted often and probably selling lots of product.  Think about it. If you search for something and you don’t find what your looking for in the first couple of pages what do you do?  Try a new search? At the same time how do those websites get into those highly coveted positions? That is called SEM (and sometimes SERP Search Engine Rank and Placement).  Developing within your site stuff that the search engines figure people will want to see when they do a search is how you get there the fastest.

SEM covers many different things from website design, marketing techniques that are all designed to increase how the search engines find your site and decide that your site is important enough to be place higher than other sites.  Some things you have control over others you don’t.  No one knows for certain what the Search Engines like.  No one knows what Google looks at in a site, or MSN, or Yahoo for that matter.  Lots of people have ideas of what they look for and different things that can be done to increase your sites ranking but each Search Engine (SE) has it’s own method of determining who is important.

In this section I will direct you to things that not only help in your quest to reach the top of the searches for what it is that your offering the internet public.

Sparky

The biggest thing to remember is that CONTENT IS KING.  While your customers will love the eye candy you put on your site, to the search engines (for the most part at present) pictures, video, audio, flash intro’s, etc… are meaningles to them.  Actually it is generally understood that Flash Media, especially on the home page, while very attractive makes it next to impossible for the search engines spiders to get through it and properly index and rank your site.

In the words of my friend and mentor Jere’ CONTENT IS KING, the more words the better, at least 250 per page, search engines read text they can not see pictures no matter how nice they are.  Now that being said, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t jazz your site up with graphics and other things, but you have to do it so that the search engines recognize them as CONTENT elements to the page.

The better your content the more likely you are to be recognized as an important site. As amazing as it may seem, search engines are a sort of artificial intellegnce.  They can read, they can tell when you repeat yourself, they can tell when your words make no sense, they can even spell.  Case in point: Coffee-n-Caffeine, my coffee website.  For a period of time I was curious why I was getting so many hits for the word Caffiene (a mispelling of Caffeine).  Eventually I tracked it down in MSN’s search engine and an accidential misspelling I had made myself in the Home Page.  A single misspelled word, put my site in the Number 1 Position on all the search engines when you searched with a misspelled Caffiene.  Obviously many people misspell things, however now you notice that if you search and misspell a word the search engine offers you alternatives with the correct spelling.  So it is not as successful a technique as it was before.  However, if your site is selling something that people could misspell putting the common misspelling in your site could put you in a number 1 position that others missed.

Sparky

One of the most important things in Search Engine Marketing is the domain name.  Unless your a huge company like HP, Apple, GM, Toyota, Walmart, etc. your domain name is one of the keys to being a player in the internet game.

At one time it didn’t really matter what you selected as a domain name as it was all about content and other factors.  Recently however domain names that produce better search results are those that have the product in the name.  Again, the way the name is produced is another key.  In the past it was significant enough to have a domain name with one of your search terms in it.  Now with the way search engines are operating and changing the ways in which they rank sites it is even more important that your domain name be as Unique as the Search term that is used to find it.  This site is a prime example.  There is a reason why I took the name that I did. Super-Search-Engine-Marketing.com is read by the search engines as Super Search Engine Marketing, where supersearchenginemarketing.com would not be as well read by the Search Engines.  So the selection of a domain name, and or names, is one of the many keys to successful online marketing.

There are many factors that produce results that are great for your site, and the selection of a domain name that will stand out and be recognized in searches is one of the first important things that are needed for a site to rank well with the search engines and make your marketing more successful.

More to come, keep watching.

Sparky

Of course with website design you need to keep your customer in mind.  Attractive sites bring people back.  Eye candy is important. If you look at my coffee site you will see that it is attractive to the eye.  It is also attractive to the search engines.

Offering lots of content is important.  Did I mention CONTENT IS KING?  Yea I think I did but you will hear me harp on it again and again as it is one of the MOST important things to search engine marketing. The more content in the form of text, alt tags and other html coding, the more important your page will rank (PR).  For information about PR I like to use other software that is available to track PR, not only across Google, but other SE’s as well.  We will get into this later.

So your design elements must incorporate not only Eye Candy for your customers but also a means for the SE’s to read your site.  Many sites use a data base program to make the pages from information they put into the data base.  A sample of this would be Harmony Cedar , their site runs on software on a computer server that offers up ever changing information.  This site also runs on a Data base where my text and what I have highlighted or made a link to is stored and when your looking at a page it is what the data base is offering.  Data base run sites can be cheap like this one, or very expensive like Harmony Cedar.

Most sites that I manage or create are made up of what we call static pages.  These are pages of HTML code that once placed on the internet shows what you see when you click to a site and view it in your web browser.  They are inexpensive to create, and maintain or make changes too.

Most people do not need to learn HTML code in order to open up a site.  Depending on your site, your host etc.. you may get software that will help you create your site.  You can use some Word Processing software to creat HTML pages from what you create in a word document.  However the best form is to create the pages from scratch or using some sort of template which content the very basic elements needed.

The Basic elements of a webpage needed in a site is: CONTENT, A Menu, A Header, and a Footer.  Almost every website page you look at contain thise 4 elements.  Obviously the Header is at the top, the Footer is at the bottom, where the content is viewable and the menu’s are located is entirely up to you and your particular tastes, or better yet the tastes of your customers.  Essentially you have 3 places where you can put your Menu, at the top of the page, along the left or along the right.  No one puts their menu at the bottom, though in the footer we do put links to other pages that are important to have on every page.

There are other types of files which we will get into later that are also very helpful to a website, like a sitemap, robots file, and other things.

So now you know the basic design elements that are needed.

A Check list so far.  You have your product/service/sage advice , you have a domain name selected, you have checked to see what the market is like, you have an idea of what you want your site to look like and contain in the form of content.

Before you go to much further you need to look at the top 10 sites on each of the big search engines.  In most cases you will find many of the same sites, but you should see at least 20 different sites between Google, Yahoo, and MSN.  Time to really look at these sites.  What makes those pages show up first?  Are they content rich or eye candy rich? Are they the big boys of the industry?  All of the sites should have common elements.  Those common element are what makes them a top site.  Go through the sites.  If you need to look at the source code for the page. The all have elements that make them top, what they have done is what needs to be done to make you a top site.

In most cases you will easily see the common elements.  Usually it’s because they are the Big Boys of the industry who get mentioned in news papers, or other media out lets.  We will get into the value of getting links from important sites as a method of gaining popularity and importance for the search engines.

If you have the money there are companies like mine that can for a fee examine the top sites track information about them and report back to you the common elements we think are making them a top search site.