Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Jeremy Wright is building some presale interest in a very big blog sale - MASSIVE Blog for Sale.

This is one of the defining blogs in the industry. When I go to conferences and mention the blog, and the author, I get an “oh yeah!” kind of response. Everyone knows this blog. It’s no Engadget, but it is in the top 100 blogs in the world (in every measure but Technorati, which is inherently flawed since it counts all time links).

It’s made every other top 100 list out there, receives numerous awards, is quoted in major newspapers around the world on a weekly basis, has a PageRank of 7 and currently makes about 2,000$/month. Though, with the traffic it was, there’s no reason it couldn’t make 2-3 times that with the right manager, designer, etc.

Also, if you are interested in buying and selling blogs check out the Buy/Sale section in our forums including some links to some sites where you can find other blogs for sale.

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Download the MP3 [ 38 Minutes - 9.1 MB]

I have a treat for you podcast listeners today - a discussion on blog traffic building with Darren Rowse, the Problogger. In this episode of the Entrepreneur’s Journey podcast Darren and I talk about how he got so much traffic to his big income earning blogs like his Digital Photography Blog, why you really shouldn’t start your own digital photography blog and why you should start a Canon camera blog instead. Darren mentions some techniques he uses to keep bringing in traffic that the big corporate sites can’t do for legal reasons, we talk about following trends and how the first mover who covers a trend in the blogosphere can get the big traffic gains and what Darren is planning in 2006.

There’s also some brief Yaro ramblings in there too, which I promise ties in with the overall theme of the podcast…eventually.

Enjoy!

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Gary over at Burts osCommerce & More Blog has unearthed a new subscription program for you niche content site builders out there that’s only just gone live and has a limited number of subscription places available. Here is his post about it - New Site - Niche Products Monthly - You have to see this!

Gary is great at making money through niche content sites, or Automatic Income Streams (AIS) sites as he calls them, at least I think he is based on how knowledgeable he reads and what he has shown me. He’s definitely doing better than I am but of course that’s not what I’m working on. I do enjoy reading his blog and if niche content site building is one of the ways you plan on making money this year then this offer could be for you. Note that I’m going purely on Gary’s reputation and what I think of his blog for this post, I know nothing about the product he’s linking to and people have already made note about the “lengthy sales letter” - I don’t like it either. I am not an affiliate for this product.

I welcome any feedback from people that sign up for the product and how well they go in the coming months implementing it. The newly relaunched forums would be a great place to report back your results.

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You should all be familiar with testimonials - comments, quotes and recommendations about your business/products/services provided by people that have purchased from you and experienced positive results. Testimonials are one of the best social proofing tools available in online business and if you don’t have a testimonial page on your business website I’d get to work now and produce one. In fact many people use testimonials as the main sales copy since they are so effective at converting new customers. However, this article is not meant to promote the use of testimonials as a general marketing tool, instead I want to explain to you another way I made use of testimonials recently to improve my local search rankings.

Local Search

When I refer to local search I mean when people use local terms like city names to find products or services. Local search can also mean specific locality based search engines that allow you to use geographic boundaries or maps to search for retailers (etc.) in your area. That’s not exactly what I am referring to - I simply mean when someone types in a search term like “Sydney plumber” into Google to find, well, a plumber in Sydney. Using city names is a very common method people use to drill down to find local information and as such Internet business owners should consider this when optimizing pages. Of course if you only service a particular area, like a bookkeeper that only works with clients in Toronto, then your primary keyphrases should focus on your local city. If you are global then there is no specific city you have to focus on, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t forget about local search optimization.

The First Money I Invested In Online Marketing

I just received an invoice from one of the very first online promotions I did for BetterEdit.com, my student editing and proofreading business. When I initially launched the website I was quite random with how I spent my meagre advertising budget and one of the very first methods I tested was to pay for a placement in an Australian directory site. The directory is a yellow pages style website, with categories for basically every business industry you could think of.

The directory was launched a long time ago, I’m not sure how many years, but at least before the year 2000. Back in 2001 I stumbled across it when I was doing some local search research in Google to see what the top results were for terms like “Brisbane proofreading” and all the other capital cities when I did an Australian based Google search. I figured a lot of people would use local city based search terms to find a proofreader and I wanted BetterEdit to be in the first page of results. I came across this directory and noticed that it was showing up really well for proofreading terms because it had a directory set up for each major city in Australia with a “proofreading and editing” category. At the time I didn’t know exactly why it had such good rankings (I would assume it’s because of how long the site has been online - it’s very well established) but I thought it was a good advertising method to test.

I emailed to ask how much it was to get a listing and after some negotiations BetterEdit was placed into the big three cities, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, under the “proofreading and editing” and “secretarial services” categories for $100 plus GST. Shortly after I was pleased to see that for a city based search including the term proofreading, the directory category with BetterEdit was coming up usually in the top three Australian based Google search results for the three major Australian cities. Thankfully I never had much competition in the proofreader category in the directory with only an occasional freelancer paying for an entry, but no real serious businesses, so any traffic that came to the directory category would end up at BetterEdit.

Fast forward to late 2005 and I received my latest invoice for my directory listings. I told them that I no longer needed the entries but I thanked them for helping me get established back when my website was brand new. Nowadays the directory has a few more entries in the proofreading categories but BetterEdit.com is the first result in Google for most Australian city based proofreading search terms. Hence I really don’t need the directory listings anymore.

How Testimonials Can Help With Your Local Search Rankings

It was during some research in Google that I noticed BetterEdit’s testimonial page was often coming up as the local search result for “cityname proofreading” and the like. It was because I wrote each testimonial to contain the city location of the person that gave the feedback quote. Since I optimize BetterEdit heavily for phrases including the term “proofreading” BetterEdit often ranks top three for city based search results, at least for Australian cities.

With this knowledge I decided to test the power of my testimonials page. My page was getting very long with over four years worth of testimonials built up so I decided to break it up into four smaller pages so it wouldn’t take as long to load the testimonials. It also looks more impressive having multiple pages of testimonials and I’m proud to say they are all unsolicited comments students have sent through - genuine testimonials - often the poor English is testament to how genuine they are!

With my four new pages I went to work playing with the title tags. On the first testimonials page I placed some major cities, mostly Australian and Canadian cities, which match the student testimonials in the text of the page. This page is usually the main page that ranks well for “cityname” local searches including the term proofreading. On the second testimonial page I included some more city names including US, Canadian and Australian capital cities. On the third testimonials page I tested with some different city names and also some states. On the last testimonials page I played around with some major university names like Harvard, Oxford and Yale to see if I could rank well for those local search phrases as well.

The Result - Improved Long-Tail Rankings

My results have been quite good. Almost all of the location based search phrases paired with “proofreading” that I targeted with my title tags bring up BetterEdit as a top three search result in Google. This of course wouldn’t work as well on a site that isn’t optimized for it’s primary keyword (proofreading in this case), but it does demonstrate a fantastic technique to get top local, long-tailed, search engine rankings.

Remember the long tail is a very important online marketplace because it’s very targeted. If you can rank well for hundreds of secondary keyphrases in the long-tail this will almost definitely bring you in a lot more targeted traffic than ranking well for a single phrase.

Once you get your site well ranked it’s worth testing techniques like this because you really don’t know results until you try and you may be surprised with how quickly you can rank for phrases you hadn’t considered before. Often pages of competing sites ignore local terms so simply optimizing a few of your sub-pages is good enough to get top rankings . If you stumble across a high trafficked local search phrase you may hit the gravy in terms of targeted traffic, or at worst you will get a trickle of long-tail targeted traffic that will give you exposure in new areas. Monitor your website referrer stats to identify the best performing terms and keep playing with your title tags to test different phrases. Easy!

Yaro Starak
Local Search Optimizer

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It’s 2006 and this year I’ve set myself a goal to make more friends with similar interests as myself. I could call this networking, as in the title of this blog post, but I’d prefer to form friendships with like-minded individuals first and let networking type business results develop naturally, if at all. Networking should always be the result of friendships in my opinion, and I value friendships a lot more than pure business relationships, although you can’t be friends with everyone. Sometimes a pure business relationship works better to get the job done.

I don’t know enough people working in the same industry (the Internet) as myself and I’ve only come across maybe one or two women doing the Internet or small business thing. Brisbane is not a tech-town, I’m sure there are people out there making money online but they are few and far between and many prefer to hide (there are a few porn kings in Brisbane apparently).

I’ve been extremely grateful with what blogging has done for me regarding networking with other bloggers, entrepreneurs and small business owners around the world. With thanks to Skype and this blog I have a handful of new friends working in the same field as myself and maybe one day we can meet in person. Unfortunately for most of my new web friends and contacts there is a big ocean to cross before we can meet.

Face-To-Face Communication

Nothing compares to face-to-face communication and that is what this post is all about. I’d like to meet some of my readers, my fellow bloggers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. I’m making a call out to anyone in Brisbane interested in meeting up to talk shop. It doesn’t matter what stage you are at with your business as long as you share a passion for the things I write about on my blog I suspect we have commonalities. Please feel free to email me to introduce yourself.

I’m Coming To Melbourne, New York And Toronto

January

I’m heading to Melbourne for the Australian Open tennis so if you live in Melbourne or will be there during the third week of January send me an email and maybe we can meet up. I’ve already got plans to say hello to Darren Rowse and I’m sure there are some other Melburnians that read this blog too.

July

Around July this year I will briefly visit New York and very likely afterwards relocate to Toronto for a few months as I did last year. I’d love to have a few friends and contacts working a similar life as myself to meet up with, so please introduce yourself if you are located in these great cities.

Of course as always I’m happy to communicate with almost anyone, no matter where in the world you are, over email or Skype. I do have a screening process with Skype and it can be overwhelming keeping up with all the contacts, but generally as long as you are not simply trying to sell me something or looking to convince me of a “great business” you want me to partner with or you have a website you want me to promote (i.e. you follow the conventions of friendship communication, not hardline salesman), then please say hello.

Business Networking

I’m sure you have heard it all before but I’ll say it again - networking is one of the most important tools an entrepreneur has access to when growing a business. In fact I would say it’s almost impossible to grow a solo enterprise into anything much larger than a “salary” sized operation without the benefits of networking. Networking gives you opportunities for new business, access to specific talents, intellectual resources and people with experiences you don’t have. No major business today would be where it is without the owner having been a prolific networker as the business grew.

Yaro Starak
Networker

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