This post is in some ways a reply to a fantastic post that was on Gary Simpson´s blog.  His Friend Linda Carroll made an amazing mp3 recording after she had heard that one of our fellow students had decided to leave the coaching course to pursue a different a different path. The one thing above all else that this coaching course with Alex Jeffrey`s has taught me is the ability to focus my attention on the job in hand.

For too long I had wandered from one idea to next, never realizing at the time that I was breaking the cardinal rule of starting an online business, or come to that any form of business, and that was to remain focused.  The rest of this post is basically an overview of what I think are the most important factors of maintaining a strong presence on the web.

YOUR EXPECTATIONS

We are all prone to believe everything we read about huge successes and all the talk of huge amounts of money being made online.  It’s only natural that we should want to do the same.

Unfortunately, we are not all going to have the same level of success in our online businesses.  Some are going to make it big, others are not.

I believe though, that a substantial amount of people will be able to earn themselves a very good income from an online business – but not overnight!

What you need to make it in this area of business is patience and perseverance.  You have to realize that like all businesses it will take time to be established and to show some monetary return.

If you go into it believing all the ‘pie in the sky’ hype then you are due to be very disappointed with your results.

You will have your ups and your downs, but what you have to remember is that you must not let your first, or even your second hurdles put you off.   You must get up and try again.

KEEPING ON TOP OF YOUR SITE

If you have been led to believe that all you need to do is to get your site up and running then you just sit back and watch the money roll in – think again!!

Your commonsense must click in at some point and make you realize that this just isn’t feasible.

You must choose your topic carefully.  I know that mini niches do work, but don’t aim at such a small niche that you won’t get anybody coming looking for what you are offering.  If it is too obscure then you would be just wasting your time.

You can find out just what people are looking for.  Google and the other search engines give you that capability of finding out just what people want to know.

There are some categories which are huge, and you really would struggle to survive if you picked them, but if you pick a topic which doesn’t have too many other people writing about , but you know people are definitely looking for, then you would be going in the right direction.

Change and new interest is where you have to be looking.  If people visit your site and like what they see, enough to make them come back, imagine what they are going to think if there is still the same stuff there.

Nothing new!  What would you do?  You wouldn’t bother coming back, would you?  Neither would I.

Remember, people just adore information, I would hazard a guess that what most people seek from the internet, is information of some sort or another.

If you don’t provide it then someone else will.  You are one of millions of sites, you have to work to make yours constantly change and be able to keep your visitor’s interest.

I wouldn’t go so far as to think that you will come up with something which would make yours No.1 out of all those millions, but that is not strictly necessary to gain visitors, however, it must be fresh and informative.

GIVING GOOD VALUE

What is good value you might ask?  Well, you have to be seen to be considering your customers wants and needs.

If you have a specific topic for your site, be it website or blog, then you have to constantly update it.  This takes work, you need to be constantly researching, doing what I call ‘your homework’.

With so many people using the internet these days they have become so much more discerning.  I know I talked in the beginning about believing all the hype about being able to become dot.com millionaires, but this is different.

Your visitors have been exposed to so much information every time they come onto the net that they have, in a way, become blasé.  They have great expectations about what they are due in the way of information.

So, you must make sure that you don’t give them anything which is untrue or questionable.  They will see right through you and you will lose them.

When you are searching for information yourself in order to post it on your site, try to find reputable sites to garner this information so that you can be sure it’s not pure supposition, but the truth.

Under the banner of value, also comes what you are offering in the nature of giveaways.

Apart from information, the one thing you can be sure will attract your visit is ‘something for nothing’.  Nobody is immune to a freebie, as long as it comes within their area of interest and is complementary to your site topic.

You wouldn’t offer an e-book on wine making if your topic of interest was politics for instance.   Do you see where I am going with this?

ORIGINALITY

There will be many who won’t bother to look beyond what is the hot topic of the moment.  They will simply jump on that particular bandwagon and hope for the best.

This will attract visitors, I have no doubt, but whether they come back again is another story.   Remember that there will be a huge number of other people doing just what you are doing – cashing in on the No.1 topic of the day.  You may just disappear into the crowd, so to speak.

Also, fads are just that – fads.  They come and go almost with the speed of light.  You can never tell just how long people will remain interested in them.  If your site is based around one of these fads then you could have a very short shelf life.

GOOD SOLID INFORMATION

One of the major points you need to take on board is never to try to write about something you do not understand.  This would be fatal because anyone who knows the topic would immediately realize that you didn’t know fully what you were talking about.

Nobody wants to be made to look like a fool, so to avoid this, choose a topic you know something about.  You need to appear knowledgeable.

If you are not as knowledgeable as you would like about your chosen topic then again – ‘do your homework’.  There is all the information you could ever want somewhere on the net.

Basically by running your site devoted to a certain topic, you are saving the reader’s time by doing the research for him.  He could just as easily trawl the net and find the information himself, which you will be serving up, but if he can be saved the trouble and time by finding it all in one place, why would he bother?

So you can see, you must make your information reputable so that you can be sure these visitors will come back to you over and over.  You must have them come back.

You absolutely must work at getting that trust in your information and get people to know you for someone who cares about his topic.

If you just serve up rubbish then you may as well shut up shop, people have too many other sites to choose from than to waste their time visiting yours only to be served up rehashed garbage.

TECHNICAL PROBLEMS

Make sure that your hosting service does not carry more than 10 other sites because this can make your service slow, especially at busy times.

These problems are quite common but nonetheless annoying for your readers if they have to wait too long for pages to be loaded.

They may be tempted to leave and go elsewhere – not what you want at all.

Be sure your site is ‘user friendly’, don’t make things too complicated.  It has to be easy to navigate and get around, there are tools to enable you to make sure that this is how it is set up.

Also, you may think that any number of adverts and banners make it look attractive, but it just may end up as confusing to the visitor.  This would be a definite negative effect, one which you would do well to avoid.

Make sure your internet connection does not suffer problems either. You could just be in the middle of making a sale and be interrupted, this would not be good for you or your potential customer.

WEEK END TRAFFIC

The success of your site is totally dependant on the number of people who come to visit and look.  Weekdays are usually not a problem, but when it comes to the week-end, a lot of folk are visiting different sites from during the week, or they are out with the family, taking a day away, going to park etc. etc.  You just don’t get the volume of traffic at the week-ends.

However, there is a hard core of internet nuts who will spend time there whatever the day and if you are able to determine which sites are visited day after day 24/7 you could get those site owners to put one of your articles on their sites with a backlink and this would probably help you to tempt people to visit your site and to get over the week-end slump.

You can view it another way, you could think of something which would entice visitors to come to your site, week-end or not.  If you give them something to look forward to.   Something which you are going to be showing only at the week-end, a product, a freebie, whatever.

I realize it sounds like there are nothing but problems to face when starting an online business.  Naturally there are problems, but there are solutions also.

You can do it, others have so why not you?  As I said before, patience and perseverance are what is needed. If you have a problem, face it, solve it and get back up.

Just a quicky post to steer you in the direction of Gary Simpson´s blog.  He has a poll running at the moment for anyone who want´s to cast their vote, to show wether you are a ¨Happy Pappy¨ or a ¨Hater Tater¨ . I gather the poll was brought about because Gary holds the positions 1 and two on the first page Google for the phrase ¨Alex Jeffreys Brainstorming¨.

The really stupid thing is that another phrase ¨Alex Jeffreys scams¨ sends Gary most of the traffic as, go figure that one !?!

Anyway to cut a long story short, all you Alex lovers go to Gary´s site and show a bit of love to our Alex. Gary has even given us an incentive to cast our votes by turning                       ¨no follow¨ off for all comments made. All you have to do is link to the post with the words ¨Alex Jeffreys¨.

If you have seen Gary´s blog morphing over the last few days then you better believe it´s a good idea to get a little link love from Gary, because his site will soon be taking off like a rocket, I for one am going to go  for the ride, holding on real tight !

The last two days have been pretty intense on the work front. We had our second marathon webcast on Friday evening in which Alex discussed in great detail the various methods of driving traffic to our respective sites.

The one thing Alex did refer to quite pointedly was, when trying to drive traffic to you own site by posting comments on other sites ´´DO NOT PIMP YOURSELF´´ This statement was brought to light by a comment that was placed on another students blog. The commentor was again a fellow student who felt quite strongly that including your own sites url underneath your comment was tantamount to spamming.

I have to admit that I have up until last night been guilty of this heinous act. Thinking about it logically there is no reason to include a second url because if you format your url in the comment bio box using the http format your name will be clickable anyway. Obviously if people read your comment and it is of interest to them, they will have the opportunity to click on your name and then go to your site.

The comment in question was left on was on Gary Simpson´s blog, go across and find it. Gary has a great blog so stick around for a while.

Obviously before you even think of driving an avalanche of visitors to your site you must have something that will hold their attention, so make interesting posts. They don´t just have to be relevant to your particular niche, make some posts about you, but make it light. I never stay on a blog longer than 30 seconds if the first post is as dry as dust.

The only thing I would say though is keep the posts coming thick and fast. Today I went on walkabout around a a lot of my fellow students blogs and I was very surprised and saddened to see that quite a high proportion of them seemed to be dormant.. if you don´t post on a regular basis why would your prospective readers have a reason to stay, and don´t forget these people could one day turn into a paying customer, surly reason enough to try and hold their attention !

The phenomenon that is Twitter was spoken about in great detail last night. Again one of the biggest mistakes you could make on the big T is to twitspam. Like all those crappy sales pitches that you are constantly deleting from your inbox, spamtwits have exactly the same effect, people will dismiss you very quickly as a spammer, so don´t do it.

The whole idea behind Twitter is to build casual relationships, did you hear that CASUAL. Don´t go and make a twit of yourself by twittering on about how great your blog is or how fantastic you new product is. Give your fellow twiters a chance to get to know you, and if you say something funny or interesting then maybe if you are lucky they may want to find out more about you and what you have to offer.

Alex was raving about a comment that Maria Andros had made about her own profile page. You normally see people linking back to their respective blogs, not Maria she links straight to a squeeze page for her video marketing course, GENIUS !!

Maria is getting a hell of a lot of optins per day using this method, it does not take a mastermind to work out how very lucrative this simple but very clever action will be.

Alex then went on to talk about how to use Google for searching out your competition. If you type into the search bar allintitle: (then place the websites name that you want to investigate), you will be able to find out such details as who´s linking to them, very useful ! The other technique is to type in allinanchor:(then the sites name) again a lot of very useful information can be gleaned by using this simple search technique.

There where lots of other free tools spoken about that are freely available to use. I read an article that spoke about 11 of them that you can use for traffic and seo purposes, please read below.

11 of the Best (Free) SEO Tools and How to Use Them — Isnare.com …

Google Adwords Traffic Estimator – this is a free tool provided by Google, which provides Adwords advertisers with an estimated cost of running a PPC campaign using specific keyword phrases. Use it like this: export the exact match …

As I mentioned earlier in the post don´t get into the bad habit of spam posting because you are not only wasting your time you also run the risk of getting a bad rep. The other point is try to keep your blog evergreen with regular posts, and then as kevin Kostner was told ¨they will come¨

Wow, I´ve just come off from the fifth webcast with Alex Jeffreys and tonight he had a guest speaker.

The lady in question was non other than Maria Andros aka The video Marketing Queen. She had me spellbound as she spoke of her meteoric rise in the video marketing niche.

In the space of 10 months she went from zero the well  over $100k ! just by harnessing the power of video.  She spoke with utter passion about her career, in fact I would say that her passion even rivals that of our very own Alex.

I cannot believe the amount of information she delivered tonight,quite incredible. The main platform that Maria uses for her own video promotion is YouTube, and she imparted  to us some very useful tips for producing  our own videos.

For example being authentic and don´t try and  bluff your viewers. I think for a lot of people this is common sense, but I can understand perfectly what she means. The time I have seen sales pitches that are so cheesy and so obviously a hard sell even though the presenter is trying not to come over as selling to you, yea right. You know the type of sales pitch that you normally see on the late night. shopping channel

The one main truism that I heard tonight is that as consumers we are not stupid. The days of the hard sell are well and truly dead.

Slightly off topic, but still quite relevant was an email that I received from Michael Cheney. I laughed so much at this video because Michael got the idea that Maria was talking about tonight totally pegged.

He sang a version of Hallelujah but changed lyrics to fit in a product he was promoting, total genius

The whole point is though, that as a consumer I would be far more inclined to buy the product from Michael rather than anyone else because he made me laugh ! A very simple concept but oh so powerful.

Tonight when Alex had his turn to talk, he told us of an amazing competition that he was running with a total prize fund of $3000, does this guy over deliver or what !!

For the competition we have to produce a video and promote it on Youtube. The most original video will win $1500 and the video that atracts the most traffic will also win $1500. Needles to say I am going to try my hardest to get somwhere in both categories. So wish me luck and on the with the filming, is that my cue now Mr Demille !!