Online Business Insights

Over the course of 4 years now I’ve iden­ti­fied a few excel­lent sources of infor­ma­tion on suc­cess­fully build­ing your online busi­ness.

All the folks I rec­om­mend I’ve signed up with and expe­ri­enced first-hand. These are all great pro­grams with solid information.

CAVEAT: There is a TON of hyper­bole and snake oil on the net when it comes to build­ing the web-based part of your busi­ness and mar­ket­ing your­self online. It’s really hard to know who to trust and who’s just pulling your wallet.

I have spent a lot of time review­ing and buy­ing some reports and pro­grams that really didn’t help, or were pretty weak on use­ful infor­ma­tion. 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.

The process of build­ing and pro­mot­ing a truly suc­cess­ful web site is essen­tially very sim­ple. There are four key steps which any course you pur­chase should include:

• Key­word and mar­ket research
• Build­ing your site struc­ture correctly
• Adding great con­tent on a reg­u­lar basis
• Opti­miz­ing your site for social and search engine traffic

The fol­low­ing pro­grams are very main­stream and teach all the basics men­tioned above. In many cases this will be more than you need to be suc­cess­ful. They also come with excel­lent guar­an­tees and no snake oil.

Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO)

For in-depth train­ing in SEO (Search Engine Opti­miza­tion) 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. Yes, I’m an affil­i­ate for this one.) 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 his ideas to your site imme­di­ately. This will be the best $47 you could pos­si­bly spend on an SEO train­ing course. Don’t worry about higher priced stuff until you mas­ter this one. 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.

Ulti­mate 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 the only guy I rec­om­mend for PPC and Adwords train­ing is Perry Mar­shall. He has a vast range of prod­ucts and pro­grams for what­ever level you need (begin­ner to mas­ter). To get a great, basic PPC intro and some ideas even old hands might like, sign up for the free Google Adwords 5 Day Email Course.

Mar­ket Research – What Do They Want?

A crit­i­cal com­po­nent of your online suc­cess is dis­cov­er­ing what every­one is look­ing for online. Are they search­ing for your ser­vice, or prod­uct? Are there any other sites com­pet­ing with you and offer­ing the same 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 basi­cally see if your ideas are good or a waste of time.

Mar­ket Samu­rai has become my favorite key­word research tool. Yes, it’s not free, but worth­while things rarely are. I’ll be adding a video walk­through for Mar­ket Samu­rai soon and you’ll see why I wouldn’t run a busi­ness online with­out it.

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].

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. 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…

Awe­ber Email List Management

Shop­ping Carts

I’m using a few dif­fer­ent shop­ping cart solu­tions right now and depend­ing on your goals, you’ll want dif­fer­ent things. If you are sell­ing down­load­able prod­ucts like eBooks, music video and you want to also pro­tect the links to the prod­ucts after pur­chase, I’ve found E-Junkie to be a sim­ple and inex­pen­sive option.

There are many oth­ers and I’ll post them here later…