It's not everyday I get a call from Inc. Magazine to be interviewed. The distinguished writer J. J. McCorvy called because he was writing an article about how-to start a successful web business.
I'm very honored! It's amazing to be recognized by such a well respected magazine. It only took me fifteen short years in the business..:-)
We did a thirty-minute phone interview and then I submitted some follow up notes. I thought you'd like to see the notes, so here they are..
(begin notes)
Here are a few specific tips for building a successful web business.
Presenting Your Website.
There should be an undeniable, clear one-sentence description the benefit your business provides on the home-page.
Example: BestWebsite.com says “The Best Website book shows how to make $10,000 a month with your website.”
Search Engine Rankings.
Understand the #1 reason Google, Yahoo, Bing ect., uses to determine how they rank your website, is the number of high-quality links pointing to your website. The more you have, the higher you rank for better keywords.
Example: You can have 300 low-quality links pointing to your website, and one link from a high-quality website and that one link counts for more. If you'd like to know what a high-quality link is, type in the main keywords for your industry and see the websites listed on the first three pages.
How-to Get High-Quality Links.
The best way to get high-quality links is to create compelling content. Forget about quantity, spend your time creating genuine quality and you will eventually be rewarded.
Example 1: I shot an 8-minute video titled “Internet Marketing - $100,000 from your website in 30 days.” If you type in the highly competitive keyword “internet marketing” into YouTube.com you can see the video shows up on the first page.
Example 2: LostLettermen.com writes compelling content about college sports. Then e-mails ESPN, Sports Illustrated and Rivals links to the articles. About a third of the time they actually pick them up, which boosts traffic by more than 100,000 unique visitors a month. (see my post for specifics.)
Keywords and Search Engine Optimization.
Go for the most specific, laser targeted keywords first. They are much easier to get and convert sales at an extremely high rate.
Example: The most specific keyword for my book is “internet marketing book.” I used the keyword in the Title tag on the homepage and used the keyword a few other times written somewhere on the homepage. Then I used Digg.com, Delicious.com and Squidoo.com to submit to and that was it, 11 days later BestWebsite.com was ranked on the first page of Google.
Designing Your Website.
It is nearly impossible to find a brilliant, reliable web-master, I do have recommendations on the Approved BestWebsite Services list of designers I have personally verified.
If you've deided to build it yourslef, you'll need to make a choice between either using one of the two main web design tools like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web.($149) The way to think about these tools is this, they’re like Photoshop, they can do anything you can dream up, but they're difficult to learn and manage.
If you're looking to keep costs down, and make the Web design learning curve easier. Choose one of the blogging tools like TypePad.com or WordPress.com.(9.95/mo) The blogging platforms have become much more robust now and allow you to do things like using your own URL, adding additional pages, inserting custom HTML code, run a newsletter, display twitter info, and almost anything else you can imagine.
Choosing one of the blogging platforms to design your website is now the best choice for most businesses because you can design and manage your entire website through a Web browser. If you need maximum flexibility, for instance, you have hundreds of products for sale. You'll need to go with one of the big two web design tools; Dreamweaver or Expression Web.
(end notes)
I don't have a publication date for the article yet. If you'd like more detailed notes on how-to start a successful web business my 2-page cliff's notes version of my book has proved helpful for many.
