Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Here at Entrepreneur’s Journey I make most of the decisions on what makes it to the front page. That’s all well and good if there were a bunch of people like me reading this blog, which I am sure there are, but really I know nothing about you guys. I realise the best way to make this blog better is to more accurately meet your desires and when I say you I mean YOU, the readers of this blog.

To help facilitate communication between you and me I’m creating this post as the official feedback and requests topic. The idea is that you leave feedback and requests for topics you would like to see covered on this blog. You can leave feedback by -

1. Making a comment response to this entry.

Or if you are embarrassed about making your desires public, you can

2. Email me with your feedback and topic requests.

So if you have some aspect of Internet business or entrepreneurship you would like discussed, or you need some help or advice with your business let me know and I’d be glad to give you my opinion and/or advice. I can sometimes use the inspiration for topics too so I really appreciate your voice, don’t hold back whether it’s good or bad or inbetween.

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The Internet has created many new career opportunities for people. As a work at home entrepreneur I would not be able to do what I do without the web. Another group that have greatly benefited from the World Wide Web are work at home moms (or mums as I prefer - Hi mum!) and for these people the role of virtual secretary is no doubt a very popular one allowing freedom to chose when to work.

Secretarial services are broad and varied. Often a secretary is a jack of all trades, completing tasks as complicated as bookkeeping to the more mundane “go post these letters”. When the Internet came along it opened up a new window for secretaries to move their operations home and to expand. The web allowed instant communications across global boundaries so suddenly a secretary could service individuals and businesses around the world effectively taking on many clients at once. True hours may increase but work also became more flexible with the at home secretary able to shuffle working hours to more convenient times.

PlusOne: For the lady with the secretarial service, we talked about what business was now and what one using the internet could be like. As I mentioned earlier, she has four casual staff physically located close by, and a large number of clients all of whom, with the exception of one, are also geographically local.

So this scenario came up:

• Workers could be anywhere – as long as they had internet access
• Clients could be anywhere – information may have to be sent by post (typically receipts etc if a bookkeeping job), but often could be sent as attached files by email
• The type of business undertaken was only limited by the skills of the workers
• The business owner fills the role of coordinator – spending time working on the business, not in the business.

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If you are presently working in an administration role and are considering making the leap to start your own Internet business then perhaps a virtual secretary could be a great place to start. It’s by no means easy to locate steady work when you first launch your business and as with anything you will face competition from others also chasing the same goals. However the virtual assistant role is one that you can gradually ease yourself into. Build up a loyal client base over time and slowly move away from your current full time 9-5 occupation. Work your local market and spread the word about your services to friends and friends of friends. Show people how they can benefit and save money using an outsourced secretary solution. List all the tasks you can do for people in a clear brochure (use those desktop publishing skills!), circulate a business card, drop flyers into local small business and use online marketing. As with any business rewards come to those with persistence and drive.

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Recently Google launched (out of BETA) a new service for it’s AdWords product - site targeting ads with a CPM (cost per 1000 ad impressions) bidding method. With site targeting if you see a content site that is displaying Google AdWords and you believe the target market of the site is the same target you want to reach, you can place your ads specifically on the site via Google AdWords. The difference with site targeting is that you bid using a cost per 1000 impressions price which competes with other bidders wanting to place site targeted ads and also the standard keyword driven AdWords bidding. Yes that is a little confusing and I’m sure you will want to read Google’s explanation of the new system.

I haven’t heard anything from the publisher’s point of view, those running AdSense on their sites, on how the new site targeting has been integrated. It could be a case that publishers have no say beyond the existing filters they can utlise now and the site targeted ads will simply show up on their sites along with the usual AdSense ads. I’ve seen content publishers already asking for the “off switch” so they can nominate not to display site targeted ads at all.

I for one welcome site targeting. I like the idea of more control to pick and choose where my ads are displayed. Whether I will ever use it effectively depends whether someone tests enough to learn techniques to leverage this method well and then educates us all. In one way this makes things simpler - I see a what looks to be a good site to advertise on and I give it a go and see if it works. Shoot first, ask questions later. In another way though, it ads yet another variable when conducting AdWords campaigns and if you have ever spent time AdWords campaigning you will know that it’s like science meets art. You can’t simply start using AdWords and succeed. Well you can but likely you will waste money and watch your keywords get turned off by Google as you scratch your head asking why and what exactly is going on. I did this the first time I used AdWords and left wondering if maybe AdWords just wasn’t for my business.

I tend to rely on the experts advice when it comes to the more complex programs like AdWords. It’s an area like with business in general where skills definitely give you an advantage and those with education will perform better. The beautiful thing about a system like AdWords is that it rewards those with patience, those that test over time and tweak their campaigns. What’s even better is that other people have spent the time testing for you and have decided to become specialists and teach others the secrets they learnt. Well the secrets aren’t really that secret and anyone can buy the education if they want to, but most don’t and instead waste away the cash misusing the system. Most experts became experts because they spent the time testing and seeing what works and I’m glad they did because I don’t have the motivation or time to do that myself. When you can spend a bit of cash, read an eBook or listen to an audio and have all the skills they accumulated in that time I think it’s money well spent.

In AdWords case I noticed that Perry Marshall was a name often showing up in search results and talked about in forums regarding learning the “secrets” to successful AdWords campaigns. I recently signed up and read his free e-course called “5 days to success with Google AdWords” which actually was pretty darn good for a free course and will give you the basics about how to “win” with AdWords. Of course there is an up-sell for his eBook which is $49. I’ve read that too and it had the really practical, “meaty”, step-by-step guides and examples that I use now for every AdWords campaign I run.

I suggest you at least check out the free e-course because it’s worth the 5 minutes of your day for some quick education over the next 5 days. The links I’ve given you include my affiliate ID so if you do decide to buy the full eBook I get a good chunk of the money so you know you are helping me to keep this blog going too!

Yaro Starak

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I’ve been experimenting with article reprinting as a traffic and SEO strategy. I’ll have more on that for you in the future but to continue with the program I wanted to let everyone know that you are welcome to republish any of my articles, audio files and original content in your own website or newsletter, provided you reference me and include a link back this site.

To make that process easier I’ve made some code available with instructions that you can use when you republish any of my content.

I’m also nearly back to 100% after the nasty fever of last week and I am ready to get back into blogging and catch up with what has been going on in cyberspace.

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In my recent post I mentioned that I was dissappointed because the individual article pages within this blog did not received any PageRank (PR) during the update that occurred in the last few days. The main page and category pages each received PR of between 2-4 which is a good start, but it’s the multitude of articles on this blog that I would like to see pulling ranking and showing up in Google SERPs.

One of the possible reasons why my pages haven’t been ranked is because of what is called the Google Sandbox, which is a relatively new theory in SEO. If you have recently launched a website and are frustrated because no matter how much effort you put into SEO your site still doesn’t show up in Google, then you could be being sandboxed. It doesn’t matter if you have hundreds of quality backlinks, a great navigational structure, hundreds of pages of original, keyword rich, content - it all means jack to the sandbox.

The somewhat mythical sandbox is a theory that has not been admitted to by anyone at Google but is largely accepted as a likely by the SEO community. It has been demonstrated to exist, or at least the symptoms have been shown to occur with enough frequency that a thoery was formed. Of course because this is Google with all those thousands of variables to consider we can never be 100% sure until someone at the search engine company puts us out of our misery and confirms it. That is not likely since Google instigated policies like this to stop people from abusing the search engine to obtain free traffic. The less the badies know the better.

Blog Business World has a great primer on the Google Sandbox. If you want to get a grasp of this concept I suggest you read the full primer, it should answer all of your questions.

Blog Business World: The Google Sandbox is an alleged filter placed on new websites. The result is a site does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords and keyword phrases. Even with good content, abundant incoming links and strong Google PageRank, a site is still adversely affected by the Sandbox effect. The Sandbox acts as a de facto probation for sites, possibly to discourage spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process.

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