February 01, 2009
Secrets to Online Marketing Series
Welcome to this month’s edition of Marketing Magic. In last month’s newsletter we discussed the current economic climate and how network marketers can profit handsomely from a global recession. This month, we are going to return to our online marketing series and show you how to successfully market yourself online.
Marketing Magic’s Contents
- Network Marketing Business School Update and $75,000 prize giveaway
- Why generic company websites don’t work
- How to choose your site concept
- Is your site concept profitable? Measuring supply and demand
Network Marketing Business School Update.Network Marketing $75,000 Prize Giveaway
If you didn’t know, Network Marketing Business School is giving away $75,000 worth of advertising space on our website over the next 12 months. You could potentially receive hundreds of new prospects for your business. To find out how you can enter click here.
Congratulations to Toby Hartnoll-White and Leonard Clements who were our January winners. Over the past month these 2 winners have had over 1700 people check out their winning profiles and we have generated a number of leads for their businesses. Make sure you enter this month’s competition and you could be our next prize winner. |
How to choose your site concept
This month we are going to talk about how to research profitable site concepts, but before we get into it, let’s re-cap what we have learnt over the past 6 months:
- Planning – create a job list and prioritise your tasks.
- How to choose a webhost that will provide everything you need to build your own website.
- The biggest secret to Marketing Online – It’s all about the Content.
Now, I would like to take this opportunity to answer a few questions that we received over the past few months.
Can you remember when you first started your business and how excited you were? I certainly can. One of the first things I did was update my profile on my company provided website.
I must admit though, I was under the belief that all I would have to do is add my story to the website and people would come running to join my business. From some of the emails we have received over the past few months, it sounds like I was not alone.
After a couple of months, not one person had checked out my website, which got me wondering about how these search engine things work.
After doing some research on how search engines like Google worked, I found that the search engines recognise company’s generic websites as duplicate content
What do I mean by duplicate? Well the website that you receive from your network marketing company is basically the same as your company’s main website. The only difference is - you get to add your story. The more duplicates there are the less likely you will be found
Search engines such as Google use “spiders” to crawl the World Wide Web and look for new and duplicate content. Additionally spiders act as the big brother of the internet watching and learning from the millions of internet surfers each day. Whenever you look at a website, whatever you click on, and whatever is written on that website, these spiders are collecting and remembering all this data. Whilst these spiders provide a very powerful role in helping the search engines to provide people with what they are looking for, it also pretty spooky to learn they are watching your every move!
Spiders recognise that your company website is duplicate content and throws it out of their listing. Meaning, if you try to search for your generic company website in Google there’s a fair chance you will not find it. The reason they do this is not to clutter the search engines with thousands of websites with the same information. So essentially you have a website without an address.
I had a similar experience last year but offline. I was in the middle of moving from New South Wales to Western Australia, some 4000 km (2500 miles). When we left the east coast, we took the opportunity to go on a holiday to Africa. During this period we did not have a home address because we were waiting for tenants to move out of our house.
My mum sent me an email to ask where she could send a package full of house warming gifts, but we didn’t have an address for her to send the package, making it impossible for the package to find us.
This is exactly the same as your company website. I couldn’t get a package sent to an address I didn’t have, in the same way that you cannot expect internet surfers to find your website when it is not even listed. This makes it impossible for prospects to find your website through search engines.
For this reason, those who do not have a website and are thinking about marketing themselves online, you need to start your own website.
Over the past few months we have been working towards this goal. By now you should have chosen three potential site concepts. The next stage is to determine which concept will be the most profitable and the theme your website will be based on.
The profitability of a potential site concept can be calculated simply by comparing the demand with the supply. The higher the value, the better. (ie: demand/supply = profitability)
So how do you determine the supply and demand for your three potential site concepts?
Supply is the number of similar theme based websites that already exist on the world wide web, essentially competitors. It is very important not to choose a site concept where there is too much competition because it may be very difficult for you to catch up. You want to look for a supply that is less than 10 000 websites.
Demand on the other hand is the amount of people searching for answers based on your site concept. For example; if someone is typing into search engines “lose weight” or “weight loss”, you want to look for a demand of more than 10 000 per month and less than 100 000 per month. If it is less than 10 000 internet surfers (people) per month you may find there is not enough people searching your website theme for it to be profitable. Also, if there is more than 100 000 internet surfers per month, this generally indicates your theme is too broad.
Once you have determine both the supply and the demand, you can easily calculate the profitability by dividing demand into supply. Rule of thumb: the profitability of the site concept should be greater than 2. This gives you the chance of being competitive in your selected website theme.
How do you go about collecting supply and demand data?
Thanks to existing software tools it is very simple. You can use software like Google adwords keyword search tool or even free software called goodkeywords. Both of these powerful programs can give you supply and demand data, just Google search these terms to find them.
The idea here is to compare the profitability of each of your three site concepts and then you choose the one with the highest profitability.
Now, that you have chosen a site concept, the next step is to come up with a good domain name. The domain name must include your site concept words. For example, if you chose weight loss to be your site concept then your domain name should be along the lines of www.easy-weight-loss.com, www.weight-loss-the-healthy-way.com, www.alternative-weight-loss-stratagies.com.
Once you have developed a few potential domain names, now is the time to see if they are available. To check the availability of a domain, all you have to do is type www.weight-loss-the-healthy-way.com into the address bar and hit enter. If the website does not come up, then it could be yours.
This brings us to next month’s topic of how to register a domain name and writing content that appeals to your readers and the search engines.
Until next month
Happy Networking
Troy Rocavert
PS: Don’t forget to reply to this email with a testimonial for your chance to win advertising space to potentially jump start your business in 2009.
