I-Marketer Blog and Newsletter

Roy from http://www.Resale-Money-Machine.com asks:

“What is the best day to send out my newsletter?”

If your newsletter goes out mainly to non-work emails, then you will find your best results by sending Friday evening or first thing Saturday morning.

Here’s why:

I want to make sure that people open, read and respond to my newsletter.  Since almost everyone who reads it does so at home in their spare time, I know the majority of those people have the MOST free time from Friday evening to Sunday  evening.

Most people are in a positive state of mind on Fridays after work–they are optimistic about the weekend, wanting to work on their own online business, etc.  A number of people open their email as soon as they get home.

But some people have a social life.

So, they don’t get to their email until Saturday or Sunday.

Sunday afternoon has the highest click through rate of any period from Friday through Sunday, but by making sure my message is in front of my prospects throughout the period I actually get more responses total.

Matt from Washington asks:

“What makes a good keyword phrase?”

A good keyword phrase is one that is closely targeted to your product or service and reveals intent on the part of the searcher.

That’s a mouth full. Let me break it down for you:

When people do keyword research they often focus on keywords that are far too general.  Let’s say I have a site where I sell digital sheet music for classic rock songs.  Here is a list of possible keywords:

Sheet music
Digital music
Lyrics
Music lyrics
Classic rock
Rolling Stones
…and so on

There are a couple of problems with this keyword list:

1. They are only loosely related to my core product—digital sheet music for sale.

Take “sheet music” for example.  Do you sell sheet music?  Sure you do.  But the sheet music you sell is very specific.  Most people who are typing “sheet music” into Google are looking for something other than what you are offering.

Would it benefit you to target this phrase?  If you got to the top of Google for this phrase it WOULD result in sales, but because it is only loosely targeted to your product it would likely not be worth the effort you would put in to get there.

2. They don’t reveal intent on the part of the searcher.

Let’s consider “classic rock.”  When someone types that phrase into a search engine, they may be looking for the phone number of the local classic rock radio station, a way to download classic rock music or lyrics to a specific song.

These aren’t likely to do you a lot of good.

Here’s how you can improve your search terms, decrease the competition you have to overcome and get more sales per visitor:

1. Look for keywords where intent is clear.

Let’s look at the term “lyrics”.

While you DO sell lyrics, adding a few words to the term will help it be much more closely targeted to your product.

Classic rock lyrics
60’s rock lyrics
Rock lyrics of the 70’s

Can you see how these specific terms reveal what the searcher is looking for?

2. Target keywords specific to your product/service.

You should target the exact keyword phrases describing your product or service.

For example:

If you sell sheet music to the Rolling Stone’s “She’s So Cold”, then you want to make sure you have targeted all of the relevant keyword phrases:

Rolling Stones Sheet Music
Rolling Stones She’s So Cold
She’s So Cold Lyrics
She’s So Cold Sheet Music
She’s So Cold music
…and so on.

Remember this rule:  The more specific the keyword the less competition and the more sales you will make.

Take time to create very specific keyword lists and you will climb quickly in the search engine results and make a boatload of money.

You don’t have to know everything to start a business from home, but you should know some things.

Think about it this way: If you were going to build a new house you probably wouldn’t do it yourself, you’d hire a professional. But you wouldn’t call a professional if you wanted to hang a picture on the wall.

The same is true for a website: You don’t need to know all there is to know about html, PHP, Javascript and ASP, but you should learn how to do a few little things. One of the little things you need to be able to do is to add a link to your site.

It’s simple and you can do it. Here’s how…

First, let me show you what a link looks like (in HTML):

<a xhref=” http://www.All-In-One-Business.com “>Click Here</a>

This code will make a link pointing to http://www.All-In-One-Business.com with the text “Click Here”. It would look like this on a web page:

Click Here

OK, now all you have to do to make your own link is change the URL in the link:

http://www.All-In-One-Business.com

to wherever you want the link to point.

So, if you wanted to point to http://www.TrafficWriting.com it would look like this:

<a xhref=” http://www.TrafficWriting.com “>Click Here</a>

To point to http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/getdirection (a free resource on Goal Setting) it would look like this:

<a xhref=” http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/getdirection “>Click Here</a>

Get it? Good.

Now, what if I wanted to not use the words “Click Here” but “A Free Resource on Goal Setting”? Here is how the link would look:

<a xhref=” http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/getdirection “>A Free Resource on Goal Setting</a>

On the web page that code would give you this result:

A Free Resource on Goal Setting

Any words you put before the </a> will show up in the blue underlined link.

Now you know how to create a link on your website.

If you want to learn every aspect of creating and running a business from home, check in to this resource:

http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/?z=2

Mike from Alberta writes:

“I am trying to start a business from home and as I study I keep reading about Google page rank.  What is Google page rank?  It seems everyone talks about how important it is, but I can’t find a clear explanation of what it is and how it works.  Thanks.”

Dear Mike,

It takes guts to start a business from home!  Good for you.  I know it can be tough when there are terms floating around that everyone seems to understand but you.  Let me see if I can help clear this up for you.

Spend any time talking about search engine position and you will eventually come across the phrase “Google Page Rank” or just “PR”.    For many it is one of the most  confusing terms around.

I’m about to shock some of you.  Ready?  Here goes:

GOOGLE DOES NOT RANK WEBSITES

Are you shocked?  Here’s why:  Google doesn’t rank sites, Google ranks individual pages within a site.

All-In-One-Business.com has somewhere around 2,500 individual pages.  Some of those pages are completely internal—meaning they are used by me and my staff internally and are not available to the public.  Some of those pages are available only to customers for certain products.  Some of those pages are available to the general public.

Google has “indexed” those public pages on my site—as of today they have 584.

When anyone anywhere in the world types in any search term, Google looks at all the pages in their index—including mine—to pull out any individual pages relevant to the search phrase.

So for one search phrase I may have a page that is number 1 on Google.  But for another search phrase I may not have ANY pages showing up.  I may have one page that shows up #1 for one search phrase and #25 for a slightly different search phrase.

That’s because Google doesn’t rank websites, Google ranks all of the individual pages within a website.

Got it so far?  Good.  Now it begins to get complicated.

Most people in the world assume Google ranks the pages in the search engine result pages (or SERPs) according to the particular keywords actually ON the page.  The “perfect” page scoring #1 and next most perfect page #2, etc.

The reality is much smarter—and more complicated.

Google looks at two types of data to determine where to rank a page on your site in its SERPs.

First, Google looks at ON PAGE factors.  On page factors are all things you, as the website owner, control.  These include the title of the page, the headlines on the page, the page content and a thing called “keyword density” (don’t worry about these yet—we’ll cover it in a later lesson.)

The biggest factors Google uses are not even on your page—or even on your site.  The biggest factors Google uses to determine what your page is about are called OFF PAGE factors.

Off page factors include:  The number of other web pages that link to your page (called back links), the importance of those pages (called Page Rank), the subject content of those pages and the linking text those pages use to link to yours.

Back links are simply links from someone else’s page to your page.   Pretty simple.

Page rank is a little more complex.

Page rank is a number from 0 to 10 which Google assigns to every page it spiders.  To Google the page rank determines how “important” an individual page is compared to other pages on the web.

The higher the number the more important Google sees the page.  Page rank 10 pages are the most important, page rank 0 pages are the least important.

Important note:  “Page Rank” is often a misunderstood term since we often use the word “Rank” to refer to how a page comes up in the search results.  Often people think a page rank 10 page will be in the number 10 position in the search results, a page rank 8 will be in the 8th position and so on.  Page rank is not the order a page will show up in the search results!

A good way to think of page rank and importance is to view each page as having a certain number of “votes” to give to another website.  When a high page rank page like CNN.com (page rank 9) links to a web page, Google sees CNN’s “vote” as much more important than a link from a site like my SeminarBonuses.com website with a page rank of zero.

How much more important is a “vote” from a high page rank page?

Each page rank number is worth roughly eight times the number below it, meaning a link from a PR 2 page is viewed by Google as important as 8 PR 1 pages.  PR 3 links are worth 8 PR 2 or 64 PR 1 (8 x 8).

A PR 7 link is worth:

8 PR 6 Links
64 PR 5 Links (8 x
512 PR 4 Links (8 x 8 x
4096 PR 3 Links (8 x 8 x 8 x
32,768 PR 2 Links (8 x 8 x 8 x 8 x
262,144 PR 1 Links (8 x 8 x 8 x 8 x 8 x

While this is somewhat of an oversimplification, it will serve to help us find niches we can easily dominate.

You want to have as many “votes” as possible from other web pages as possible.  You can get thousands and thousands of PR 1 and PR 2 pages or you can get a few PR 5, PR 6 and PR 7 pages.

Obviously a small number of higher page rank pages are much easier to get and maintain than a huge number of lower PR pages.

So if you have a web page all about cultivating elm trees and want to score highly for the term “cultivating elm trees” then ideally you want many high page rank pages about elm trees on other sites to link back to your page with the term “cultivating elm trees” in the linking text.

Now that you understand how Google ranks pages, you can put that knowledge to work to get top search listings for YOUR pages.