Business Insights

Over the course of 5 years now I’ve iden­ti­fied some excel­lent sources of infor­ma­tion on suc­cess­fully build­ing your online business.

The Inter­net Rub­bish Warn­ing: There is a TON of hyper­bole and snake oil on the net when it comes to infor­ma­tion about build­ing the web-based part of your busi­ness and mar­ket­ing your­self online in gen­eral. And each day the noise grows ever louder.

A while back I decided to start test­ing and review­ing train­ing and infor­ma­tion prod­ucts. I took copi­ous notes and built a list of the good stuff and the rubbish.

After spend­ing much money and time and test­ing fanat­i­cally, I found that many reports and pro­grams really didn’t help or were pretty weak with no prac­ti­cal application.

The “Inter­net gold rush” seems to be moti­vat­ing some folks to take ques­tion­able, or out­dated and inef­fec­tive infor­ma­tion and re-package it (poor writ­ing included) with the wild hope that they will sell enough of it to get rich overnight with no effort at all. (And no sup­port, or refund for the buyer.)

The process of build­ing and pro­mot­ing a truly suc­cess­ful web site is essen­tially very sim­ple (but not easy—it’s a lot of work, no mat­ter how you slice it). There are four key steps, one or all of which any course you pur­chase should cover:

1. Do the mar­ket research—identify your tar­get profile(s)
2. Build your site and struc­ture accord­ing to the research in step 1
3. Cre­ate great information/training and pub­lish on a reg­u­lar basis
4. Opti­mize your site for social and search engine traffic

The fol­low­ing pro­grams are proven to teach the ele­ments men­tioned above. In many cases they teach just one of the com­po­nents and in oth­ers they go through the whole process. They also come with excel­lent guar­an­tees and no snake oil.

Mar­ket Research – What Do Cus­tomers and Clients Want?

A crit­i­cal com­po­nent of your online suc­cess is dis­cov­er­ing your peo­ple. Are they search­ing for your ser­vice, or prod­uct? Are there any other sites com­pet­ing with you and offer­ing a sim­i­lar thing?

There are some great pro­grams that will teach you how to research your topic and see who’s look­ing for what you have to offer and how to see if your ideas are a good match for what peo­ple are need­ing or want­ing. Right now I’m just link­ing to basic key­word research tools, but I DO plan to review some com­plete pro­grams that teach you how to start at the beginning.

Mar­ket Samu­rai is my favorite key­word research tool. It’s not free, but worth­while things rarely are. And you really need to under­stand what you’re try­ing to do with this tool before it’s use­ful. If you want to check out the entire train­ing series they have for learn­ing the tool, head over to the Mar­ket Samu­rai Dojo. They have an exhaus­tive set of mate­ri­als here and you’ll learn a lot about key­word research even if you don’t have the application.

I’ll even­tu­ally add some other train­ing here, but for the moment, you can learn a heck of a lot by sim­ply using the Google Key­word Tool [free].

Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO)

First, get all the free stuff (all from Google) and use it and you may never need to spend a dime on learn­ing SEO. Here are the best free resources I know of so far. Let me know in the com­ments if you have oth­ers wor­thy of our time and effort!

Read Google’s SEO basic intro­duc­tion: Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO)

Read Google’s Web­mas­ter Guidelines

Read Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web.

Reg­is­ter for Google’s Web­mas­ter Tools [Free] and fol­low the direc­tions within.

Down­load and study Google’s Search Engine Opti­miza­tion Starter Guide [PDF download]

Beyond all that just men­tioned, (and it’s a LOT! Don’t under­es­ti­mate it!) if you want to go even deeper into this arcane craft, read on …

For in-depth train­ing in SEO I am first rec­om­mend­ing the excel­lent pro­gram by Aaron Wall over at seobook.com.

Alter­na­tively, a much less expen­sive and still very in-depth option is to pick up a copy of Jerry West’s excel­lent Google Best Prac­tices SEO train­ing guide (reg­u­larly about $47 last time I checked. And yup, I’m an affil­i­ate for this.) I bought this and read it in one day and made effec­tive changes to my sites the fol­low­ing day. Print it out, sit down, and start tak­ing notes because there’s a LOT of info here and you’ll want to start apply­ing these ideas to your site imme­di­ately. This will be the best $47 you could spend on an SEO train­ing course. Don’t worry about higher priced stuff. And the next one… which is free.

Another great (and free) resource, this one only requires you join the mail­ing list and is a great com­ple­ment to Jerry West’s best Prac­tices book is Dan Thies SEO Fast Start. Between these 2 books, there’s lit­tle more you would want to get or spend your own time on. If you need more than this, con­sider becom­ing an SEO expert your­self, or just higher a really good SEO company.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Adwords Knowledge

If you need to buy traf­fic or do some really smart mar­ket research (and if you’re seri­ous about your online busi­ness, you even­tu­ally will) then it’s impor­tant to get ven a basic han­dle on PPC con­cepts. Before spend­ing even a thin dime on any­thing though, just study with Google first. It’s free and it’s com­pre­hen­sive. They have a com­plete AdWords Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram avail­able online, but you don’t need to take the test. Just go here and start learn­ing: AdWords Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Pro­gram Learn­ing Cen­ter. You can thank me later when you’re an Adwords expert.

Email Man­age­ment

When you’re ready to start your newslet­ter and/or autore­spon­der sys­tem, you have quite a few choices.

So far I have used Awe­ber exten­sively for man­ag­ing email lists and I’m very happy with them. I’ve tried just about every­thing includ­ing MailChimp, iCon­tact, Mad MiMi, Con­stant Con­tact, Cam­paign Mon­i­tor and even DaDaMail. For var­i­ous rea­sons that I will gladly detail in a post if you are inter­ested, I switched back to Awe­ber. I did like Cam­paign Mon­i­tor a lot though too.

Awe­ber has a lot of free train­ing and instruc­tion and they are adding improve­ments on a reg­u­lar basis. Huge point here and I’m kinda going out on a limb, you might think, but really, I’m not: You can­not build or run a suc­cess­ful online busi­ness with­out devel­op­ing a great email list. And if you’re still send­ing email to your cus­tomers straight from your com­puter email pro­gram, you’re fly­ing totally blind, aside from the fact that you’re prob­a­bly vio­lat­ing the CAN-SPAM Act. Just say­ing. Don’t mess around. Do it right…

You can even have a free test drive on Awe­ber and run it through it’s paces. They include train­ing in mail­ing list best prac­tices when you sub­scribe below:

Get more infor­ma­tion about Awe­ber here: Awe­ber Email List Management

Shop­ping Carts

I’m using a few dif­fer­ent shop­ping cart solu­tions right now. The hard part about choos­ing a shop­ping cart is deter­min­ing exactly what you don’t need it to do. If you are sell­ing down­load­able prod­ucts like eBooks, music, or online video train­ing and you want to also pro­tect the links to the prod­ucts after pur­chase, E-Junkie is a sim­ple and inex­pen­sive shop­ping cart solu­tion. How­ever, it’s best if you have a small num­ber of prod­ucts to sell since cre­at­ing links to more than 50 or so prod­ucts could be tedious and dif­fi­cult to manage. It’s extremely inex­pen­sive and it’s the best cart for fast and easy setup of dig­i­tal prod­ucts, espe­cially when you want to use expir­ing deliv­ery links and cre­ate a quick affil­i­ate pro­gram for your prod­uct. It’s extremely reli­able and the owner/developer actu­ally replies to email. What a concept!

One other really won­der­ful shop­ping cart solu­tion I’ve been test­ing recently is Get­DPD. Get­DPD has a very use­ful option called PDF Stamp­ing to embed the customer’s info on every page of a PDF file which is great if you’re sell­ing an eBook or paid report. They also have most of the other bells and whis­tles you expect and the inter­face is a lit­tle eas­ier to man­age than E-Junkie.

Mer­chant Accounts

Pay­Pal
I’ll keep this short for the moment. I use a com­bi­na­tion of Pay­Pal and a stan­dard mer­chant account to run my busi­ness. I find that Pay­Pal is a crit­i­cal pay­ment option as many peo­ple pre­fer to pay that way. Addi­tion­ally, the fees Pay­Pal charges are a good deal lower in some cases than those charged by my mer­chant account. If you haven’t got one yet, it’s free to sign up for Pay­Pal and I rec­om­mend doing that now whether or not you have an imme­di­ate need for it. And did I men­tion that it’s free too . At the very least you can eas­ily receive pay­ments from soneone who wants to send you cash through Pay­Pal.

Pow­er­Pay
Hav­ing a mer­chant account is what will allow you to accept credit cards online (or in per­son for that matter). You have to apply for most every mer­chant provider and whereas some com­pa­nies will charge some appli­ca­tion fees (often $100 or so) Pow­er­Pay is free to apply. I’m cur­rently using Pow­er­Pay and was using Land­mark Mer­chants (who were just bought by Blue­pay). I’m also look­ing at other options that might offer bet­ter per­cent­ages on the fees. So far Pow­er­Pay has been extremely respon­sive though and I’m cer­tainly very happy with them so I’m not par­tic­u­larly moti­vated to find an alter­na­tive. As long as the ser­vice level stays up there and pay­ments are processed as seam­lessly and quickly as they cur­rently are I’ll likely stick with them. Pow­er­pay actu­ally doesn’t charge a signup fee at all and they promise to approve 99% of appli­ca­tions within 48 hours. You can apply for a free mer­chant account through Pow­er­Pay or just check out the details and see if it fits your needs.