How to Keep Your Online Business Alive
Building a website and starting an online business seems to many small business owners like a big step. This often makes them feel exhausted after it’s done and they do their best to pretend that it’s all they’ll ever need.
So much so that when someone tells them that their site’s software needs updating or that the content needs to be refreshed and extended, they almost hate that person. “What?” they say, “Is it not enough I’ve spent all that money getting this responsive, singing and dancing WordPress site with mobile bells and whistles, now you tell me I need to spend more money?”
Sadly, it’s not.
Yesterday, a friend rang me and casually mentioned that his online business website had been hacked. He was miserable, because he didn’t know how to recover it and had no way of getting his site back, because he had not kept any backups of the files or the database.
Link Exchange is Dead. Now What?
Let’s face it. Search engines are not interested in making SEO easy. By definition, SEO is a set of ways to manipulate search results, so why should the?
Google has always made it clear that the best way to promote a website is by focusing on human searchers, rather than on robots and crawlers. In several algorithm changes, it specifically targeted links that serve no purpose other than SEO and content that serves purpose other than SEO and advertising revenue.
So basically, traditional link exchange – you link to my site and I’ll link to yours – is dead. Gone. Buried. No more. You get it.
What now? How should an honest small business use the mighty Internet for some promotion, then? Without swapping links, what CAN we do?
The answer is … (drum roll) … fresh content.
Everyone can do it (with expert help)
The first thing you learn about starting a business on the Internet is that everyone can do it. I remember the first seminar I attended. You may have had the same experience yourself. It is a free event that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in one day. The food, the venue and the free gifts are nothing compared to how many suckers come to those events for the promise of sitting on the beach in a swimsuit with a laptop, sipping cool drinks and watching the dollars appearing on the screen every day and every hour.
Gal and I went to our first event as life coaches. It was an awesome weekend. It was a great seminar and I learned a lot. For 2 days, they promised the world “Be your own boss! Work 3 hours a day! Money will be coming out of your ears!” and … “Everyone can do it!”
I have to say I almost believed them. I wanted to believe them with all my heart, but because our life coaching course had promised exactly the same thing, I had the suspicion there was a pattern there. Luckily for us, it was not a test of our trust. We just did not have $10,000 to buy the product on offer. We were shocked that our fellow coaches spent so much money just weeks after they had spent thousands of dollars on the life coaching course.
If you have ever heard these slogans about trying to build a business on the Internet, be warned, someone is convinced you are a sucker and might be taking you for a ride.
My Site Has a PR5!
C H E C K T H I S O U T ! I was showing someone this site as an example and quickly checked my Google PageRank (PR). It was 5! In the past, whenever someone offered me SEO services, the first thing I did was check the PR of their site, […]
Market Leadership
I often hear people talk about “market leadership”, wanting to be “the market leader” or even to “dominate my marketplace”. Many business and marketing seminars hype their audiences up with these and similar terms. But these concepts cause the opposite type of think to what actually brings success. You see, in order to succeed in […]
You don’t know what you know
For the past few months, I’ve been facilitating a Small Business Online workshop. Small Business Online is an Australian government initiative to help small business owners create web presence for their business and get business online.
What will compel you to buy?
Will you make a purchase from a stand-alone Landing Page that you’re visiting for the first time?
The Truth Will Set You Free
Attracting lots of traffic with promises you can’t fulfill is pointless. Attracting a continuous stream of visitors who buy and refer others will create an endless online business for you.
AdWords Performance – I Win!
Here’s how I beat a Google AdWords Certified Partner at their own game – getting clicks to a website quicker and for less money.
