How To Find the Right Domain For Your Business

A Domain Name is a name given to your website that gives you an identity on the web and is the name by which your site will be identified.   Every website has its own domain name, there will never be 2 with the same name unlike an offline business or franchise where the brand name IS the business.

For example, compare a Domain Name to an offline Franchise Name such as McDonalds;  if this was an online business and you were buying into McDonalds you would look for a Domain Name, preferably with the McDonalds brand but the Top Level Domain i.e. www.McDonalds.com will not be available as it will be used by the overall business owner.  So, what you would do in effect is to look for perhaps McDonaldsburgers.com or McDonaldsRealBeef.com.

I made 2 short videos that I hope explains it a bit further:

How To Choose the Right Domain

How To Find a Keyword Rich Domain

To Check Availability and Buy Your Low Cost Domain,

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5 money making niches for 2010 and how you can get the edge

5 money making niches for 2010 and how you can get the edge

Doing extensive research into what is happening in the world of online marketing has led to 5 main areas that are displaying rapid growth and these are:

1. Education
2. Health & Wellness
3. Booze
4. Local, local, local
5. Pets

People ask the question “is there any niches that are too saturated” and that is a very good question.   If you do your research thoroughly and you find that questions relating to a particular niche are continuing to crop up often in various forums or search engines, then you have your answer right there.

The next question you may ask is “should I go wide or deep into the niche”?  Going deep would be something like taking a niche market and targeting it towards a particular group of society, for example ‘Health & Nutrition for older people’ and that would be called going deep in one market.

Going wide would mean doing a little bit in Booze, a little bit in Pets, a little bit in Education and so on.

3 main benefits of Niche Marketing

• Much less competition – you can own and dominate a particular niche subject
• Subject expert – owning a niche means you become that person that everyone goes to for their solutions.  More people will seek you out rather than your competitors
• Faster results – it doesn’t take long to rank well for niche related keywords

If you specialise in one particular area, it doesn’t take long at all to rank really well with the search engines.

Finding a niche and how you can get the edge

Go into discussion forums and find out what the top questions are – note how many  replies there are to each question, note how many times each question has been viewed.  Focus also on the answers that other people are providing to the questions.

One idea from there is that you do extensive research and create an eBook that in turn answers all the questions that people are asking.  I must emphasise at this point that you should never plagiarise anyone else’s efforts.  The content of the book must be in your own words and based on your research findings.

The first step is being able to build a product that people are willing to pay for and that answers their question.

How can I find forums to do research on?

If you go to big-board.com you will find there a directory of message boards that tell you how many posts each forum has and how many members, the more posts, the more active, the more people there are, the more answers you can get to questions relating to your particular niche.

Big-board does not necessarily list all the forums that are out there so what you could also do is go to Google and search for ‘your keyword forum’, for example ‘Honda car forum’ and put this in quotes.  This will provide a ton more message forums within your niche.

You don’t want to get involved with a forum that has only a few posts and even less members as this will get you nowhere.

Another great source of niches is called ‘Top Site’ and one in particular is called Squidoo.   Given that there are thousands of people on Squidoo daily, being ranked in the Top 100 is a big deal.

Another great source of information is hubpages.com and every day they have what is known as Featured Hub.   Hubs are just very simple web pages that people have made that explain how to do something or something they recommend, things like that.  Like Squidoo, you can search hub pages by category.

There’s nothing about hub pages that appears to rate one more highly than the others, the top one changes every day so if you see one that is of interest, make a note because it will soon be gone.

If all the above has given you food for thought, why not sign up here and start BUILDING A WEBSITE.  You will receive a FREE copy of ‘Create Your Own Website by 3.45 this afternoon’.

How to get maximum exposure using Press Releases

What is a Press Release?

It is a written announcement that seeks to draw the public’s attention to a specific event or product launch.  It is a very formal and professional means of advertising your business’ products or services.

You would normally expect a press release to be submitted by a business informing the public of newsworthy events regarding their business.  An individual however can also submit a press release advertising their business or affiliate product with extremely successful results.

So why does your business need publicity?

The main reason is that publicity is the most cost-effective marketing tool out there.  A press release can be seen by thousands of people in your target market and a really professionally written press release will build your business credibility like no other marketing strategy can.

Due to the ever growing interest in online marketing, there is much competition out there so the pressure is on to make your business stand out ahead of the competition.  It is imperative that you build credibility in both yourself and your business.  It is fundamental to any internet marketer that they create a strong and sustainable online identity.  Press releases are one way of helping you do this.  They are one of the easiest and most effective ways of establishing yourself as a leader and promoting your business as one that people should take notice of.

Traditional methods of advertising versus Press Releases

Some people view the more traditional methods of advertising as hype and let’s fact it we’ve all been subjected to our fair share of hype over the years.  This type of advertising is fairly prevalent amongst online businesses and raises a certain degree of scepticism amongst the public because more often than not the truth is always stretched.

A press release, on the other hand is viewed with much more credibility because it holds value and truth in the eyes and mind of the reader.  They provide a great way to build your online presence.  If people remember your name and see value in your first product, it’s almost a guarantee they will buy your next and your next after that.

If you have a website, it would be good advice to have on there a news section or ‘what’s new’ to draw in even more potential customers.  Customers won’t see you as an individual trying to scam them or sell something just to make a quick buck.  They have the credibility of your site showing them you’re a real person, particularly if you have a short video on there telling them a bit more about you and your opportunity.

Press release and SEO rankings

When you submit your press release to a distribution company, it will often appear on Google News, Yahoo News and other major online news services.  Once featured on these sites, other search engines will feature your release on their top spot as well.  In fact, more search engines including Google favour press releases and will place them before websites, articles etc.

Submitting a simple press release will put your business/website/product in front of millions of customers within your target audience instantaneously.

Just do it!

If you are serious about making money online and would like to find out how you too can be successful within our turnkey marketing business, just fill in your details at the top right of this blog post, or alternatively visit my main site to find out how I can help you change your life forever, just like I did.

6 resources that will tell you how your online marketing competitors are doing

As a serious online marketing entrepreneur you would definitely want to know how your competition is measuring up against your own success.  If they’re doing better than you, wouldn’t you want to know how they’re doing this and how you can tap into some of that success?  Well, you can and it’s not as difficult as some people would have you believe.

This can simply be done by going to Google and typing in the relevant keywords to see who your competition is based on their paid advertising.

How it’s done in the offline world

This is similar in the offline world where businesses monitor their competition over a specific period of time.  They monitor their ads and the ones that continue to run are those making most money whereas those with the shorter lifespan tend to be those that haven’t worked out.  One way they may do this is by looking in magazines and taking notes on the full-page ads then checking back issues through the local library.

Online competitive analysis – Basic sources of research

The focus for this is those businesses using paid advertising within Google.  Technology is available on the internet that does this analysing for you and is called KeywordSpy.com.  What you are looking for are advertisers in Google that are paying for the top spots in competitive markets and that keep the same ad up there week after week.  KeywordSpy.com will provide you with all of this data.  It is amazing what you can find out about your online competition this way and you will probably find that you know more about their advertising campaigns than they do.

Using this method, you can also see exactly how much they are paying per click on every keyword they are bidding on in the paid advertising section of Google.

Competitive analysis can also be carried out using a resource called CBEngine.com.  This is mainly used by affiliate marketers to find undiscovered clickbank marketplace products before everyone else starts promoting them.  It can give you access to profitable hidden information and help maximise your affiliate marketing efforts.

A final one I came across during my research was TeraPeak.com and this will do everything the ones above do and more, but is focussed on the EBay marketplace.

3 main analysis sites that all serious marketers should be using

One of the key findings of your research has to be the amount of traffic that your competitors’ websites are getting.  You may already be familiar with a FREE resource that gives you these answers and more and that is Alexa.com.  All you need do is enter the website in the search engine and you will be given the estimated volume of traffic going to that site.  Once you find your competitors’ websites on Alexa, simply keep tabs on them each week to see if their traffic is increasing or decreasing.  This tool also allows you to see which websites are linking to your competitors’ sites.

Another incredible tool is found at Compete.com.  This is similar to Alexa but uses various other metrics in gathering date and the results are more accurate than those at Alexa.  With Compete you can find many things such as keyword, website ranking.   There is more advanced data available through this site that will cost you a couple of hundred dollars, but if you are trying to model after your top competitor, it’s perhaps a small price to pay.

Summary

As you have read, there are many places online that you can go to gather data about your competitors.  I would also advise paying close attention to the number of keywords that an advertiser is bidding on in Google and you will find this at KeywordSpy.com as outlined above.  The reason for this is because the more keywords and advertisers bidding, the more traffic they are receiving, a sign of their growing success that you want to be a part of.

When analysing traffic on your competitors you always want to uncover which competitors are the power players and which ones are not doing so great.   Armed with this data, you can begin to plan your traffic strategies.