Corvette Birthday Satisfaction

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

My birthday is coming soon.

Last year, I rented a Corvette from Hertz. It’s cheaper to rent from a nearby hotel than to get it at LAX, so I went to the LAX Marriot. I reserved it for 10am and arrived a few minutes early. They weren’t ready. They said it was currently being washed. I went out side and waited, only to see the guy go out, get in the dirty Corvette and drive it away to be washed.

I waited for 2 and a half hours before I got the car. I wasn’t happy at all. I wanted something. This was supposed to be the big driving birthday and they stole 2 and half hours of it from me. They called a manager in from another location to resolve it. We talked. He gave me a certificate for $100 credit, good for a year. I was happy.

It’s now almost a year later. I wanted to rent a Corvette again, but before my birthday, to make sure the certificate worked. I rented from the Hilton this time. They actually pick you up from your house, which was nice. They got me to the hotel on time and we did the paperwork. The car was ready and they pulled it around front for me. Bam! Done. I was happy.

As we finished the paperwork, I told the guy that this experience was so much better than last year and I really appreciated it. He said yes, he remembered. He was the manager who gave me the certificate. Ah, yes. It came back to me. This was the guy. He was totally reasonable and made me happy. THIS is great customer service. He took an angry customer and turned him into a satisfied, happy customer, who came back a year later and was happy again.

Hertz rocks. Rent cars from them. I endorse them. If you want a car in LA, rent from the LAX Hilton.

And the day with the Corvette? We went down the 405 to Ortega Highway, a twisty mountain road in Orange County. We drove over that to Lake Elsinore and then back again. Down to the beach, in San Juan Capistrano, and turned right on PCH. We drove north on PCH through the length of Orange County, up to Long Beach, where we had dinner, then home on the freeway again. Over that whole trip, we averaged 20mpg. That includes the few short runs down by my local beach with blasts from 0 to 100. I think I went faster than 100mph a couple times, but I was too busy watching the road to look down and check.

Those short blasts made me laugh out loud. The sounds of the engine, getting pressed back into the seat, the road coming at you faster. I love that. That’s what a Corvette is, driving down by the beach in Southern California. It’s not just steel and fiberglass. It’s the dream, the feeling, the ideal. Laughing out loud in pure joy.

And it’s all yours for only $180 a day, 100 free miles included.

Posted in other |

Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry – Email

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Deborah is going at her business full force. She had a “house party” on Saturday, where she got to present her jewelry. She got a few custom orders and sold a few pieces. She pushed her web site.

People asked about buying product from her web site. I’m working on adding the “wp-e-commerce” plug in to the site. I JUST upgraded the site to WordPress 2.8, which was released on maybe Wednesday. It seems that the plug in has some relationship issues with v.2.8, so we’ll have to see how they get resolved.

On Friday, she sent out an email to a bunch of her closest friends. She wasn’t using a mail management system and I didn’t tell her to do that, she just did it because she thought it would be a good idea. It was a good idea.

The chart above shows that she gets an average of maybe 3 or 4 people visit her site per day. On Friday, when she sent out an email, telling her friends about her business and inviting them to the site, she got 37 unique visitors.

That, my friends, is the power of email.

If you need an email management vendor, I use and endorse Aweber. Starts out at $20 a month. Click here for more details. http://www.aweber.com

Posted in SEO |

Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry – Domain Names and SEO

Friday, June 12th, 2009

One more thing that I forgot to talk to Deborah about, when we met, is her domain name. She registered, set up and used, http://www.mermaidspurse.us. That’s cool because it’s her business name.

I really wanted to get the keyword phrase “sea glass” in there if possible. I asked her about it and she approved it, so I registered “mermaidspurseseaglass.com” and that’s what we will use. I changed the settings in WordPress and did all of the DNS and web server set up.

It is possible to redirect traffic from one domain name to another new one, but it takes time and effort. It’s easier and better to just analyze and decide on the best one to begin with and point all of your Google juice at it.

All of the links you get from blog comments and forum posts and emails will all point at the new domain name. The old one will work, but it will be redirected to the new name.

I’m going back through my posts here to link to the new domain name.

The business name is Mermaid’s Purse. She creates sea glass jewelry. We want to own “sea glass” and “sea glass jewelry. The domain name is “mermaidspurseseaglass.com“.

You don’t have to have the domain name be exactly the same as your business name. There’s the real world and then there’s the online world. (Those are words to live by.)

Posted in SEO |

Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry – Ground Zero

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

My wife and I met with Deborah, who creates sea glass jewelry at mermaidspurse.us. I posted about the research I did for her site below. I found the keywords and the competitors and decided what we should target.

Once again, I learned something about my client that I would have never known without talking to her. Last time, I was surprised that brides search for wedding flowers based on the venue, not on the city. This time, I was surprised to learn that there’s a difference between “sea glass” and “beach glass”.

Now, I live near the beach, near LA. I ride my bike at the beach regularly. Deborah told me that the difference between “sea glass” and “beach glass” is that “sea glass” comes from the beach of an ocean, while “beach glass” comes from the beach of a lake. Thinking back, I remember that the “beach glass” web sites were located near lakes, not oceans.

How do we “own” the keyword ‘beach glass’, when all of her products are “sea glass”? I’ll have to think about that one for a bit. At the least, we need a page that describes the difference and uses the term a lot, including in the title. Maybe a disclaimer on each page telling the difference. Not sure yet.

Organization

The real question I needed her to answer for me was how she organized her jewelry. Does she have enough that we’ll need to dip into the world of ecommerce? Yes, yes, she does. She doesn’t want to put up too much at any one time, so she doesn’t overwhelm shoppers, but she’s got a load of jewelry. This girl is prolific.

My next move is to review ecom solutions and decide which is most appropriate for her. We need to get that page count up with product pages for each of her items.

She also has a very specific organization for them. Whenever I do an ecom site, I always need to figure out how things are defined, by color, size, price, type, or whatever. How will a user browse the products? What makes the most sense? How are things organized?

She has types of jewelry, e.g., necklaces, bracelets, pendant, etc., I was thinking that the next cut would be by color. She already did better than that. She’s got them separated into collections. Each collection is named after a local beach or area. “White’s Point” is the white jewelry. Hermosa is the light blue stuff. Porto is darker colors. Hermosa Beach is at the south end of my bike ride, while I start out in El Porto. (Porto Rules! Locals Only, Dude!)

WordPress

I taught her how WordPress works and gave her instructions on using the NextGen Gallery plug in. This morning I was pleasantly surprised to see two new pages with all of her photos loaded. Very nice. Most clients freak out and need me to hold their hand through the process, which I’m happy to do, and actually good at doing, but not Deborah. I gave her instructions and she did it on her own. I’m very proud of her. The lesson there is that even if you are not sure what you are doing, or you are afraid to try something, go ahead and try it and most likely it’ll be OK. Props to Deb.

Statistics

This is a new site, weeks old. We’ve just begun to put content on it. It’s got a few pages, but we’ve not really tried to optimize anything yet. I wanted to get a baseline, a ground zero, so we can track what a great job I do on SEOing her site.

The first metric was the number of external links she has. We used Yahoo Site Explorer. Remember that her five biggest competitors have between 300 and 1,700 external links. Deborah has two external links. Both of those links are from me, from this very site. We talked about how to work on getting more external links. I’ll be sharing what we do as we go along.

She has 1 page indexed, but we’re working on that with the ecom plugin. Where does she rank for her search terms? Where do you think? She has no listing in the first 3 pages for any search term, in any of the 4 search engines we’re checking.

I think ground zero is really a zero. We’ll start here and build up.

Posted in SEO |

Small Business SEO – Wedding Flowers, Venues, and Page Rank

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

I just talked with Richard, a client that I’ve had for years, who happens to be an old friend. We met over chicken enchiladas at the Elks Club. He and his wife do wedding flowers at flowerart.biz. Their flowers are really well done and creative. Their target demographic is on the high end, but not the highest. (Can a bride be a “target demographic”?) They do weddings in Palos Verdes, San Pedro, Redondo Beach, and the surrounding area.

My first thought, when considering how to approach SEO for his site, is that people would search by city or by zip code. I was wrong. First lesson of SEO is to listen to your client and find out how their business works, what is the sales process, what is the business model?

What happens is that our target, I mean, our beautiful bride will pick a venue first. Once that is decided on, they do research on all the vendors that can support that venue. It’s not “city”. It’s “venue”.

This also qualifies the bride. If you are having a wedding at an expensive, nice venue, then you are probably spending more money on flowers. We want to target brides in higher end venues, so the budget will be larger. They don’t do run of the mill flowers or charge run of the mill prices. You want the best, you pay for the best, and you get the best.

The sales process is usually that the bride picks the venue, then goes down the list of recommended vendors and looks at each web site or calls each vendor. When they see the incredibly beautiful, outstanding site that we designed for FlowerArt.biz, they immediately pick them. Or maybe someone else. The goal is to get the phone call.

Research

Since the main source of business is referrals from venues, we’re going to look to see if there’s any business from people just searching on the web. We still want to be rated high for the keywords that people use to find wedding flowers.

Doing a quick search in Google’s AdWords tool, I found that the following related terms are used in order of number of searches per day:

• wedding
• flowers
• weddings
• florist
• florists
• bouquet
• wedding flowers
• wedding decorations
• wedding centerpieces
• wedding flower
• wedding bouquets
• flower arrangements

These are so broad that we will never own them, but we do want to use them on our site. The key here is that we will want to be found for the venue names. We’ll have to pair those keywords with the venue names.

My problem is that I’m not sure how brides actually search, what keywords they use and where are they in the planning process. We’re going to target these keywords and venue names and see what happens. After a month or two, we’ll look through our keywords and referrals in Google Analytics and see what’s working, then adjust our strategy.

On Site Analysis

It seems that we’ll need more pages on our site and we’ll have to make sure that each page is linked correctly to every other page. We now have 133. Most of those are “gallery” pages where we’re showing photos of flowers they’ve done before. (I’m a guy and not real impressed by flowers, but I must say that these are pretty cool.) We need to add more gallery pages. I’ve told Richard to post to the “news”, i.e. blog, page more often. If he makes it through the month of June alive, he’ll work on that. I’m going to look at recoding his gallery pages so that it’s easier for him to add photos.

Off Site Analysis

We have 63 external links, but I’m not sure that’s enough to blow anyone away. We’ll need to get a lot more than that. There are a lot from other vendors that they like and work with. Those are great to have. We should try to get more links from friends, but not everyone, no matter how much they like you, will add a link, or even know how to add a link for you. People are great, but doing it yourself is better.

Here is where posting comments on blogs, posting messages in forums, and writing articles for directories will come in. I’ll do some more research on where the most effective places to do that are.

It seems that there are a lot of directory type web sites out there that have hundreds of thousands or pages, but the pages all have really low individual page ranks. Because of the huge number of pages on the site, the individual page does get returned higher than our page for a specific search term. The only way to beat them is to have a much higher page rank on our pages, which should be easy to do with more external links.

Richard is compiling a list of his main competitors for me. I’ll analyze each one’s web site to see who is linking to them and see if we can replicate some of those links.

Statistics

The list of venue names, added to words like “wedding flowers”, will comprise a list of search terms that I’ll run reports for to see where we stand now. We’ll chart that same list each week to measure our progress. This report will tell us exactly where we are on the search results pages for each term. We’ll also chart the visits to the site in Analytics, as well as the referrals and the keywords used in searches that find us. Search results, visits, and keywords will be our measurement of the level of success we have.

Currently, we’re ranked pretty high for each venue and the phrase “wedding flowers”. Here is a link to the current report. http://www.walton.com/flowerart/060909/

Posted in SEO |

Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry- Keywords and Competition

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

I haven’t gotten her approval quite yet, but I really want to help a friend promote her sea glass jewelry site. She does killer, beautiful jewelry made from glass that’s been rolled around in the ocean for a while to grind off all the sharp points and soften the look of the glass. You can buy commercially processed glass that looks the same, but she’s gathered all of hers from local beaches in Southern California. We meet to discuss all this on Wednesday.

I did some research to know what to talk to her about when we meet. I wanted to know what the best keywords should be and I wanted to know about her competition for those keywords. The first thing you should ever do when you are trying to SEO your site is to determine the correct keywords to target. Without that, you will never know if you succeeded or failed.

What Keywords Should We Target?

Starting with “sea glass”, I used Google’s keyword tool and found that “sea glass” had 2,433 searches a day. I assume that people were looking for all kinds of sea glass, where to buy bulk sea glass, methods for finding it or cleaning it or whatever else. It’s not that targeted at jewelry.

Next came “beach glass”. I’ve never heard to it referred to this way, but Google has. 1,332 people search for “beach glass” every day. We also have “seaglass” at 398 searches, “sea glass jewelry” at 325 and “beach glass jewelry” at 95. From there, we have all sorts of other keywords with less than 100 per day, including “sea glass jewellry” at 24, so make sure to check those misspellings.

These are the keywords we’ll concentrate on; sea glass, beach glass, seaglass, sea glass jewelry, and beach glass jewelry. Next we’ll look at who else ranks for those keywords.

Who is the Competition?

We’ll do a search for each phrase or search term and see who comes up in what order.

When we search for Sea Glass: Wikipedia comes first. I don’t think we’ll beat them, but they aren’t selling jewelry, so I don’t think we have to. The seaglassassociation.org comes next. Again, not sure we need to beat them, but it would be nice if we could. The next two are westcoastseaglass.net and naturalseaglass.com. These look like they might be our biggest contenders.

Let’s look at “beach glass” next. Wikipedia is first. The next two are relishinc.com and bytheseajewelry.com. These are the ones to beat here.

Seaglass returns Wikipedia and the association, followed by westcoastseaglass.net, followed by someone I’ve not seen before, then bytheseajewelry.com.

Sea glass jewelry gets us naturalseaglass.com again. They are followed by bytheseajewelry.com and westcoastseaglass.net. They are definitely on my radar now. jewelrybydaniellerenee.com looks easy to beat, but there’s relishinc.com again after danielle.

Beach glass jewelry gives us bytheseajewelry.com and relishinc.com first and second. Fourth is naturalseaglass.com. Our old friend westcoastseaglass.net is eighth.

It looks like our competition is westcoastseaglass.net, bytheseajewelry.com, naturalseaglass.com, relishinc.com, and if we can crush poor, sweet Danielle at jewelrybydaniellerenee.com, that will be fun too.

Read Part Two: Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry- Keywords and Competition

Posted in SEO |

Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry- Keywords and Competition – Part 2

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

Why Do They Rank So High?

Why are these ranked so high? Let’s use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to investigate them. We want to know how many pages and internal links they have on their site and how many people link to them externally, from other sites. These two factors are huge in determining search engine rankings.

Let’s review the pages and external links for each of these and see how it relates to their rankings.

In order of ranking:

Site	Pages	Total Links	External	Internal
westcoastseaglass.net	773	2,149	1,774	375
bytheseajewelry.com	921	1,663	785	878
naturalseaglass.com	536	1,178	687	491
relishinc.com	292	546	265	281
jewelrybydaniellerenee.com	5,268	5,017	335	4682

It looks like the number of external links is the major factor in ranking. External factors that we haven’t looked at would be the page rank of the linking sites and the “anchor text” used in the links (the actual text that you read on the external site and click on for the link to the target page). Internal factors that we haven’t looked at would be keyword density, formatting, titles, meta descriptions, and all the other “on site” SEO issues.

We now have 5 keywords to target and 5 sites to target. We’ll study those sites for more details about how to beat them. We’ll have to figure out a way to get the number of our pages up and linked to each other, then go after the external links.

Oh, and I need to meet with my friend and get her approval to work on her site first.

Posted in SEO |

How To Make Money On The Internet!

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

I have actually been making pretty good money for years on the www.survivor.com site. If you have a fan site that you want to improve, I can walk you through how I did it over there. That site pays my mortgage.

I’ve been very interested in making money on the Internet for a while now, so I’ve been reading a lot of web sites, subscribing to a lot of email lists, and buying a lot of ebooks.

I’ve learned about affiliate sales, about SEO, writing, email lists, ebook production, niche sites, coaching, and Internet marketing. There does seem to be a pattern or a process that does work and people really do make money on the Internet.

After all of my research, I’ve discovered a profound truth.

The best way to make money on the Internet is to market products teaching people how to make money on the Internet.

Everyone wants to make money at home. You can make a ton of money at home by showing other people how to make money at home by showing other people how to make money at home.

You may think I’m kidding, but I’m not.

I’m also going to follow my own advice and I’m going to tell you how to make money at home, on the Internet. I’ve been doing it. I’ve been studying it. I’ve been researching it. I’ve been telling friends about it. Now it’s time for me to tell you about it too.

I’m going to try a unique angle at though, that I don’t see anyone else doing. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like specific advice on building your own real business is missing. I’m going to try to change the focus of this site towards giving advice and examples of real world people with businesses and how we’ll work to improve them. We’ll try to look at what steps we take and what effects they have. I’ll show charts and graphs with numbers on them.

If you’d like to read some other great sites about how to make money on the Internet (by telling other people how to make money on the Internet), here are some examples, starting with the best, moving towards the less inspirational, Seth Godin:

Seth Godin

Godin is author of ten books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and his ebooks are among the most popular ever published. He is responsible for many words in the marketer’s vocabulary, including permission marketing, ideaviruses, purple cows, the dip and sneezers. His irrepressible speaking style and no-holds-barred blog have helped him create a large following around the world.

Read the entire article at:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Hugh MacLeod

The market for something to believe in is infinite.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.gapingvoid.com/

Chris Guillebeau

279 DAYS TO OVERNIGHT SUCCESS

Friends and readers, here is my second manifesto, 279 Days to Overnight Success.

It tells the story of this web site, but more importantly, it offers 11,000 words of free advice on how to create your own success with your own project. I offer this information freely, but please use it wisely.

Who It’s For:
Bloggers, writers, online artists, and anyone otherwise interested in creating a new career or expanding their influence using social media. If you want your online presence to grow far beyond what it is now, read and apply.

Read the entire article at:
http://chrisguillebeau.com/

Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, doors opened to a book deal, several national TV appearances, and a flurry of speaking engagements around the world. Gary’s dual identity as both business guru and wine guy has made him the “Social Media Sommelier.”

Read the entire article at:
http://garyvaynerchuk.com/

Naomi Dunford

Hi there, and welcome to the IttyBiz Store! Here you’ll find all the cool products to help you market your business more efficiently, or even just some cool stuff to make your business a little more fun. I mean, don’t get me wrong — I’m sure your business is really fun. But maybe you can have a little more fun running it. Keep your eye on this space — new products are added regularly!

Read the entire article at:
http://ittybiz.com/

Yaro Starak

“How To Start An Internet Business…and make your first $1,000 online“.

The book is not about basic tutorials on the practical aspects like setting up websites, choosing domain names, etc. It talks more about mindset and business strategy, although I include 12 steps necessary to start an online business at the end which are quite practical.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/

Michael Martine

Blog Consulting & Coaching
I know the web is full of free information. So, why would you pay me good money to answer your questions and help you figure out your blog marketing plan? Because finding information online isn’t as easy or as effective as you may think.

Read the entire article at:
http://michaelmartine.com/

Sonia Simone

If you’d like to learn more about this marketing and communication stuff, especially in order to make more remarkable connections with your customers, and you’d like to do that without paying one skinny little penny, sign up below! The content for each of these is unique, but it can be a firehose of information if you sign up for ‘em both together. I recommend taking them one at a time to give yourself the mental space to really absorb the lessons.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.remarkable-communication.com/

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

Struggling to market your company on the Web? You’ve come to the right place!

We offer the Web’s largest source of key information about doing business on the Net — with over 2,500 pages and annotated links to more than 21,000 resources on e-commerce and Web marketing.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.wilsonweb.com/

Brian Clark

Content drives the Internet, and using the right words in the right way will determine not only how well your site converts visitors into sales, but also how well you rank in search engines and how many links you get.

Now that blogging has become the smartest strategy for growing an authoritative web site, it’s your copywriting skills that will set you apart and help you succeed. Copyblogger is all about helping you:

Read the entire article at:
http://www.copyblogger.com/

Posted in money |

gapingvoid: twenty five years

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

But part of me also knows that, had it gone more smoothly, more quickly, I probably wouldn’t have ended up somewhere NEARLY as interesting.

Everybody pays full price for being who they are. Only the interest rate fluctuates.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/004980.html

When I was younger, I was paying a high interest rate. I was a short term, high risk kind of guy back then. Lots of pain and hearthache. Now, I’ve been in for the long haul for a long time. I’m older and more dependable.

What happened? Victoria happened and I grew up.

Posted in other |

Now if only I could quit being such procrastinator…

Monday, June 1st, 2009

I recently got an email from a client/friend who I have been helping with a web site. They made what I think is a profound statement:

Now if only I could quit being such procrastinator I could really get some s**t done.

I think the key to it all, to all of life, is to get off your ass and do it now. Momentum is the greatest killer of success. Not only in business and web development, but in relationships and career and yard work.

It is more important to start something now and get something done, then to plan for perfection or wait for opportunity or gather resources or whatever else you seem to be doing instead of DOING it.

If you want a new web site, have me build it now. If you want a new job, go find it now. If you want to SEO your site, find out how and do it now.

Sometime, heck, most of the time, you have to complete one task before you can start the next. That can slow you down too. Just do the first one now and the next will take care of itself. Prioritize, pick a goal and move forward. Just put one foot in front of the other. Then do it again. And again.

Get off your ass. Now!

Posted in business |