As the title suggests this blog will unfortunately be going into hibernation for a while, as work gets on top of me and lists are piling up. But watch this space, when I return I will bring many good things, such as a new redesigned theme and lots more ideas and advice to pass on to you readers in the form of textual intercourse.Its better to work when your fully capable, it means the work you do do will be full bore, all out good work. Efficiency, if led in the right way, leads to completion of goals.
See you soon Readers!!!
I’ve touched on microsites before, but lets go a bit more into the concept. The idea is essentially this, build seperate, small websites that are good for several reasons:
- Being Separate from your mainsite has its advantages. You can be more specific, where you couldnt build a 5 page detailed look at one product easily on your oscommerce you can on a seperate site. Also by being seperate you can highly target your seo more blatently without worrying about jeperdising your main branding. Similarly you can express other thoughts on a topic, for keyword placement and to attract different end users only to lead them to your main site.
- A setup microsite can act as a bridge drawing people to your main site.
- A setup microsite can feed PR to your main site (hosted with a seperate company)
- Quick to set up
- Done correctly it can provide free advertising, free customers to your site, free PR boost for your site and even create a revenue.
Effectively you decide on your main site, 2 sites or small network of sites - your flagship big push project/s and then build a network of smaller, supportive ‘pusher’ microsites to aid the growth of your main site. They are designed to be left alone with little to none maintenance post development (which should only be a day or so) and self sufficient, paying their own way.
Here’s a few steps I would advise you read before proceeding with developing a good microsite network as a base to a main site.
Steps:
- Get a different host - Hosting accounts are key to making use of microsites. It is probably not nescessary to have a different host for each site - maybe 2 microsites per hosting account in different niches. This is because each different hosting account will have different IP (shared hosting might have a load on one ip.) Different IP’s will help defuse your spread to the search engines. (it will help but I am sure google is not stupid to this!)
- Get a good keyword relative domain - “candle-wax.com” would fit a candle wax subsite.
- Go Niche - Choose an absolute niche - go niche and then niche of that niche. The better the niche the more chance your microsite has - if you sell a range of candles, make a microsite about candle wax types.
- Build around a main site - using the previous example if you ran an online candle shop you could build microsites on: candle wax, bees wax, candle products, candle gallery, homemade candles, original candles, world candle records.
- Time Manage microsite production - Limit your time on each project - I tend to allow a day every few weeks to building a microsite. Its not always constrained to a day, and doesnt always take a day - but don’t waste years making it stunning, stick to the basics - good original content, good link structure and clean code.
- 1-15 pages - its only a microsite, start it as a microsite, plan how many pages you are going to have and fill them with good original content.
- Links - Stealth links work - make it a ‘fake’ online shop that when the person clicks ‘add to cart’ it sends them to your main site, its also a great chance to get some real contextual links to your main site. Use words that are what the pages they are linking too.
- Monetize - I will explain further down but done well will actually make money as well as helping your main site.
So if you manage the above you should be able to create 1 microsite in a day, 1 effective, targetted, long tail niche micro site in around 8 hours. Then what? Well then you push it - as you would any other site - but provided you have chosen your niche well and seo’d your pages this shouldnt be too hard. Strategic linking of your microsites together can help although you want google to think them as different as possible so use different sources for linkage, dont typically link them all together and try and differentiate them all from each other. Also do not use your main site to help them - this is not benificial. Use the microsites to boost your main site not the other way round!!
Monetizing your microsites should more than cover the costs associated with setting them up, therefor allowing you a free place to advertise, draw customers and further dominate your niche.
First things first stick some pay per click or similar on there - although typically you are trying to get people to your main site - so not over the top otherwise you might loose customers for only a few pennies. Using Matched.co.uk you should be able to make a minimum of £15 per month, unless your site is badly designed and poorly linked too (and you don’t have 5 good pages on it). You give them 5 urls that you will stick links on and they will approve/not approve you and give you a bit of code. Having this ad on your site will then get you £3 a month. Not much but 5 of them and you get £180 a year - that should more than cover hosting and registration fees 
. You are limited to 5 sites with each account on matched though (each with 5 pages = £75 a month)
Kindly use this link if you are going to use Matched so we can all benefit 
Further monetization with amazon affiliates, Commision junction or ebay auctions is all good progress but as the site is so niche you are not likely to get huge returns on the effort. Personally I keep it reasonably simple but I have got a few micro sites running all of the aforementioned.
So try it out - microsites as a base for a larger web project! - If you require further consultation regarding seo powered by creative microsites then let me know
Networking is a key business skill, a way that many of the top success stories of our time have played out and highlighted in the saying “its not what you know, its Who you know”. Now I put a fair amount of belief in that saying, primarily because it shows a clear definition between skills and people, that is you could know php in and out, maybe you even know a good place online to sell it, but sooner or later if you completely lack people skills your business will come a cropper.
As with all things it depends on your intention, but if you intend to succeed in business - then in 90% of cases you will need to master at least the basics of networking and people skills. From phoning up a sales lead or calling back an old customer the phone is part of the skill, politeness, charm and a positive distraction from the day are all skills of telephony that will allow you to lure people into maintaining a phone based business relationship. Furthermore public events, promotions, the hard sell are all good skills that you would expect a sales person to have done to the tee, but as an entrepreneur you have to act as a jack of all trades, learning enough of all areas of your business - in this case dealing with potential customers is key. Its worth noting that I have noticed that the people who are good with crowds, the loud ones begging for attention are not always the victors of the social war either. They may appear to be the life of the party, but resist joining in - be a clever people person - learn when to play and when to hold your hand!
Anyway people know about networking in real life - I find it fairly awkward and just have to throw myself in the deep end, and when I am there I am usually more than fine, but what about networking online? How do you develop friendships, business relations and find useful contacts online?
There are both good and bad ways to do it, as well as good and bad reasons for doing it. Finding helpful people sitting on the other end of a laptop or pc somewhere else in the world can be great for support work, online work etc. but the downside is you have to compete with spam and I find that the anonymity of net tends to mean that online workers can take longer to do things, drop projects more, scam you easier, be less answerable (e.g. if abroad.) With this in mind I would advise that if you need work done and you are going to look online for a solution, or if you want to find someone to mutually help you and themselves online then first know where too look:
Forums - A great source of information, connections, discussions, reviews, opinions. The great thing about forums for finding useful people is that good forums (e.g. digital point) have well established rep systems and its easy to find out if most people on there are trustworthy.
Advertise - Don’t forget sometimes the person you are looking for might find you - if you advertise on your site or on an appropriate niche website you will find your man. Key here is detail - lay down exactly what you are looking for - then you will either be able to choose from a list of lots or wont get the man you want because he doesn’t exist (or you are advertising in the wrong place!)
Blog Comments - Comment on peoples blogs you like - and don’t. Its often said this is a good idea - but the dislike is underplayed. Be honest, constructive criticism is 100% better than ass kissing, if the person is real then they will see your comment as what it is, if they just flame back they aren’t worth your time.
Manage your Time without mercy. Its always tempting to burn into the night commenting, posting, emailing - but the best way to build good relations is under reasonable sustainable situations.
What you think about that then? Tell me what you think or read something else from my Archives!
- 5 Startup Points - Don’t let your business be a failure from the start
- Subscribe the Masses - Great ways to get people subscribed to your blog
After the google pagerank update I was surprised to see one of my blogs I had originally created purely for links testing purposes actually outranked my time-spent well written personal business blog. The blog in question is hosted on wordpress.com with a subdomain and achieved a great PR4 - about 2 months old with 35 posts of original text but full of links. I was using it to feed some contextual links to my main project and it helped me in the serps as much as any other contextual linking, but with daily targeted accuracy.
The way I think I achieved this PR4 status was purely by my use of tags and categories on wordpress in my posts. I literally did probably 10 exterior links into the blog - tiny steps to get it noticed, but what I did do is tag with funny, common and crazy tags. This way it gets into the ‘tag’ lists on the homepage and other pages on wordpress.com - essentially the blog gets handfuls of easy, quick and contextual PR8, PR7 and so on links. Even the blog which in content terms is pretty shocking gets hits - through this system - all be it 10 a day - I never intended to get them, even 40% or so click through to the site I was contextually linking too - so its win win
Its well worth setting one up and just casually posting - it’ll help your whole serp efforts - I guarentee (but keep it quiet!) In summary here’s the ups and downs I have experienced in the last two months of testing wordpress hosted blogs.
Positives to having a subdomain.wordpress.com:
- Free Hosting
- Quick Setup
- Trust (cos you have .wordpress.com after it)
- Tags can be used and abused
- Categories can also be used to the blogs benifit
- Theme widgets are very easy to use
Downsides to using wordpress hosted blogs:
- No control over files - you cant add google adsense or pay per post code
- In fact no code control whatsoever - limited control
- long domain name
- can take a while to think of a good subdomain that isn’t taken
Here’s some more awesome reading for you!!!
- 3 Great ways to avoid disaster - virus squashing
- 3p Adwords Clicks - Cheap advertising
- Pagerank Update - Count your losses - smile at your wins!!!
How often do you use forums? PHPbb lover? Myself I am registered at Digital-Point, Site-Point and a handful of niche forums. But is the day of the forum still relevant? Do we still have time for forums?
With the global hype of the blog system and the development of wordpress, blogger and the whole blog ideology perhaps forums will fade away and become another fall out software that worked well in its time. I doubt that will happen completely but I see numerous business’s placing more belief in blogging than in forum administration.
I suppose if you compare the two, blogging is a more self centered approach to the same issue. Blogging says ‘I am an expert and I am more interested in what I have to say’ or ‘I have something to give - come see’ whereas forums are intended to be more communal. So perhaps its in that, that we choose our preference. If we seek communal chatter we hit forums and if we seek expert advice we seek blog articles? This isn’t right - we don’t. But perhaps blogging allows bigger stars to be made, with a fine line between people that read and comment and bloggers the roles are emphasised?
I would say that forums are a mine of useful tips, they allow networking and communal discussion in a way that no blog system/blog network I have seen can do.
So I suppose we blog and forum post for differing reasons and results, and personally I will continue to do both. But if the whole world has a blog - who’s going to read them all?
Fancy a little more reading?
- Subscribing people to your blog - conquer the email blogosphere
- Organise your online Reading - tips and tricks to spending no longer than nescessary reading
- Ditch the coffee - get me some lemon Juice!!!
I get through a fair amount of online reading, whether the format is blogs, ebooks, general webfodder or books relating to the net. I tend to primarily read about business on the internet, how the big players made their money and how people are making ends meet using essentially 1 huge network. So a mixed bag covering business, technology, buying online, selling online, entrepreneurship and eVentures.
- SEO for wordpress - Great plugin that will re-write your titles in a more google friendly manner
- W Revenue - Sound advice from someone who knows what they are talking about in business and the net
- Johnathon Volk - Another business blog worth a look
- Dosh Dosh’s Link attack - similar to this but a great list of online business and blogging advice
- Wired does Alex Roy - The crazy gumballer drives across america - fast - worth a read if you watched gumball
That’s it for this week folks!
Stuck and wanting a quick good email subscription manager I turned to forums - and found Feedblitz, after going through the long setup I am fairly happy with the results.
By simply sticking your email in the box to the top left (on homepage) you will be able to subscribe to my blog - Great or what? No more rss readers or bookmark finding - just subscribe and your done - a great way to get a good interesting post a day!
I would recommend Feedblitz too, definately does what it says on the tin, as I get a less modest number of subscribers I might even insert their little widget
The internet is huge and is absolutely easy to get lost in, you find yourself typing something into google like ‘used audi’ and leaving your desk 3 hours later after reading the history of audi rallying. More so with blogs and business reading, I could spend every waking moment of my life reading things written about business online, business blogs, economist reviews archive statistics, whatever. So to combat this I have developed a little system that works for me, and I thought I would share it with you..
I am using firefox and googlereader - two things I would suggest everyone uses.
Firstly I have a folder in my bookmarks toolbar (creating folders is a great way to organise links), and in this folder I have two other folders entitled ‘new‘ and ‘good‘ - these are fairly self explanatory.
Secondly I also have google reader set up and ready to add feeds to subscribe too.
I also then stick a google reader bookmark in the reading folder for quick access.
In essence as you browse the internet for whatever you usually read, if you bookmark pages you think may be good to read later - save the bookmark in this new ‘reading->new’ folder. Doing this rather than reading the page then when you should be doing something else will help you prioritise your time.
Then when you actually do have a spare moment to do some reading (or in the evenings) you can go to the new folder and do a bit of reading, saving the good sites into the good folder and adding their rss feeds to your google reader. Mercilessly delete bookmarks to sites that are not hard to find or don’t have something good and uniquely interesting to you on.
This system helps me to not spend my working time reading and to spend my time reading rather than surfing.
Hope it works for you!
Like this post? Maybe you would fancy reading one of my other posts on business time management and efficiency!:
- Blogging for business - how to blog more effectively for business
- Pagex - A great little bolt on seo cms that will save you loads of time running a website
- 10 Steps to submitting your site - Startup websites are easily launched by following these steps
Business, entrepreneurship, money - all great topics for a blog. Mix in a comic view on the world and your away. The best bit is that your readers could really benifit from what you are saying by learning from your mistakes.
With this in mind here’s 3 Tips for blogging about business:
1. Use real life examples - talk in detail about how you solved that problem with management or led your team to a new financial high - real life examples can carry a lot more value than theorising.
2. Remember your blog is public - so don’t chat about mergers, critical strategies or customers openly - you could land yourself in it!
3. Go niche - a common phrase in business these days, but so for a reason, niche is supposedly where the money is right now so if your in business as well as broadly speaking about your experiences, theory on management - chat about your specialisms - whether your company produces surf boards or manufacturers shoes - talk about what you know!
Gotta love the people at problogger.net -$54k worth of stuff they are giving away!!! Shows what a bit of Blogging might can do if you persist at it!
Problogger.net Birthday Bash Giveaway!
Hardwork gets you the chance to give away that much to your appreciated readers on your birthday! Hands up to problogger!