Alexa rank breakthrough

Just a quick update to my last post, today our e-commerce or ecommerce (which do you prefer?) shopping site that we operate as a part-time activity has just hit the top 1 Million in Alexa! We have done that on our own without the use of any SEO companies. In the future when we are more profitable I may well engage a specialist company to assist, and there are some good ones out there, but for now am content to work away at the Search Engine Optimization of our business sites myself.

I am very pleased with the results and have lots of plans for the site. Its Alexa rank is now 994,840 and climbing quite dramatically. But it is important not to get carried away with one ranking or another, as happy as I am about making it to the top One Million already what does it really mean?

What is even more important is how it ranks in terms of the keywords we are targetting - can it be found by our customers when they are looking to buy something? Is it linked to by many other sites? Do people buy from it or just browse and leave? How long do people stay on the site or do they just "bounce off"? Do customers come back? Does our site provide some real value to customers? Do the customers recognise that value? Can it be easily found in organic searches? Does it achieve our business goals such as making a profit? Does it generate leads for backend sales and profits? And much much more.

A much longer post is brewing on this topic but meanwhile here are a few great articles I came across recently on the topics of Search Engine Optimisation, Keyword rankings and similar topics. Hope you find them useful.

• http://www.alexa.com/help
• http://blog.alexa.com/2009/04/why-does-my-alexa-rank-jump-around-the.html
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
• http://www.submitplus.com/trafficpro.htm
• http://www.orangesoda.com/search-engine-optimization-blog
• http://www.seoquake.com/articles/en/
• http://www.orangesoda.com/pay-per-click-blog/what-not-to-do-on-your-ppc-campaign/
• http://blog.orangesoda.com/no-secret-sauce-to-ppc

Until next time

Owen

Latest Alexa Rankings of our Sites

Many posts ago I mentioned the Alexa rankings of this blog
http://the-small-internet-business-blog.blogspot.com/2009/02/measuring-search-rank-of-this-blog.html

and the Top One 500 to One Million sites in the World.
http://the-small-internet-business-blog.blogspot.com/2009/02/top-500-sites-on-web.html

So what has happened to the search rankings of this blog, and several other sites we run since then?

Where were we?
Back in mid February this blog, my career blog: http://careerblog.owenmcnamara.com/ and our new and very rough at the time company website: http://www.knowledgestream.com.au/ were all unranked. That is if you went into Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/) there was insufficient data for any of our new sites and so they had no ranking.

Now where are we now?
Today this blog ranks at 3,400,745
(http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/the-small-internet-business-blog.blogspot.com)

The Career Blog ranks at 2,503,229
(http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/next-career-move.blogspot.com)

Our company website, definitely better than it was, ranks at 2,093,571 (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.knowledgestream.com.au)

My new, as yet empty, WordPress (or Joomla and Wordpress - still thinking on that) blog ranks at 3,220,059 (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/owenmcnamara.com)

And our new e-commerce web site, launched just one month ago already ranks at: 1,456, 787

How we did that, in such a short time, is a long story and I will put together a blog sometime. I wonder where all those sites and more will be in 3, 6, 9 months from now? I expect they will slowly grow and then plateau, but I am not sure what the level of that is as yet.

To put those numbers above in perspective go to the SiteInfo section of Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo) and try out a few company sites you know to see where they are. Some will be very high and some much lower than you expect.

What does it all mean?
Does the Alexa ranking of your site matter? What is the relationship, if any, with the organic search results for your site? Should you care?

Well, like most things, it depends. I will continue this very interesting topic in my next blog later in the week.

Until then, below is a presentation I came across that has some useful information.

Owen

Top 10 SEO Public Relations Tips: TopRank

View more presentations from Lee Odden.

Innovative Internet Video

Recently I came across another really innovative educational video that has nothing to do with internet business but everything to do with education, information exchange and presentation and just what can be done with imagination and the right tools.

The following extract explains the video: "Tomas Nilsson, a graphic design student from Linköping University, tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood with animated infographics. The video (below) was inspired by Röyksopp's Remind Me and has that ever so familiar European electronica music moving things along. Covering topics from grandma's nutritional value to the aerodynamics of the traveling bus, the video is very tongue in cheek and totally worth the three minutes of your life."

Have a look, you need sound on as well and just think what can be done with that sort of video. Then compare with the great Common Craft videos I mentioned in the previous blog. Both styles are interesting, innovative, imaginative and engaging. I hope you like this.


Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

To read more go their site: Flowing Data Website"


Enjoy

Owen

Educational Videos - How does the Internet Work

Sometimes I come across things that are just so good I have to share it. Have you heard of the company: "Common Craft". They are a small company that develop wonderful training videos that you can watch at home for free, but if you need to use them for business of course there is a fee.

Here are a couple of their videos for your pleasure - simple, clear, effective and very creative.

How does the Internet Work?



How to improve the way you search on the Internet



Aren't they great?

Here is a link to their website: Common Craft Website

Owen

Email Marketing

Recently I have been reviewing email marketing tools, often called autoresponders for my own business. For those that don't know the term autoresponder is confusing to many: there are the simple autoresponders in your email system and email marketing autoresponders. Most email accounts will enable you to set up a simple autoresponder that for example replies to any received email when you are away on holidays, but no more than that.

For internet marketing and ecommerce much more sophisticated email marketing tools are needed and readily available - at a very reasonable price. These tools enable you to for example, set up entire sequences of emails to be sent out at set times to your email lists, to collect users email addresses in an opt-in form and to enable people to unsubscribe from your lists - all automatically! These tools will also comply with government standards for anti-spam. They also enable you to track your email newsletters to find out if users/customers/members are reading them or not.

In the next few posts I will discuss several of the main systems available and today I will start with one called Get Response.

Here is what you get with it:

- Personalization of emails
- Unlimited follow-ups
- Complete import and export features
- Send a broadcast email to your entire list all in one shot
- Attach files to any or all of your autoresponses
- Track your leads and responses
- Your choice of 19 different domains names to send from
- Send HTML-enhanced messages
- Your own "confirmation" screen
- Selective broadcasting
- Block unwanted email addresses
- Bounce-back management
- Full activity reports via email
- Free, unlimited technical support
- and more!

To see the full feature list with demos click here or on the icon below.

And for those in the affiliate marketing business you will be surprised that GetResponse allows you to purchase their products for yourself on your own affiliate link and still be rewarded for it! Most companies do not allow that at all. I believe GetResponse is being very smart with that approach and they have a great product. So check it out. I did, and bought it for my own business and am using it every day.




I will discuss some other well known email marketing tools in later posts.

Owen

Finding a Niche Market - Long Tail Marketing

Lately I have been spending a lot of time trying to find some new niches for our online business and if you have done that you will know that it isn't easy. I know some people who seem to have that skill naturally. You know those people that just seem to have a good hunch as to what is a good market niche to get into at any time. But it doesn't come to me that easily or to many people. So just what I have been doing to do that?

First I come up with some different ideas of product or service areas or hobbies or topics where there may be a need. Sometimes I get ideas from the news or magazines or topics of conversation. The key there is to always be looking and asking the question: "I wonder if there is a niche there?". Then I do some searches on the net in those areas to see what is available. I use the fantastic Google Keyword tools to help me understand just how many people and in which countries are looking for those products or services. The Google Keyword tool can be found at http://www.googlekeywordtool.com. I use these tools everyday and am continually amazed at what you can do with them.

Most often of course I find a market already full so I move onto the next one until I find one where there is a niche that is not too full, where people need something, and where I can add some value to those people. Then I set about supplying something for that niche market. This can take a lot of time and I find is quite an iterative process with a lot of trial and error. I have to browse around quite a lot at times. Often I start looking in one product or service area, and notice an adjacent market that I hadn't thought of where I can put together an offer that satisfies a niche. So I often start down one path but find others along the way that offer me some chance of success.

For instance I am currently marketing great products in areas that I certainly had no intention of marketing originally but I found them, loved them, found a niche and so promote them and feel I am adding value by presenting different markets with products they love but didn't already know about. Of course even if a market is full you can still be successful if your product or service offers something that others don't and if your marketing is better.

To really analyse what looks like a promising niche market I use additional tools to Google and I also have some spreadsheets and processes of my own. There are many commercially available tools out there, just do a search and you will find them. Personally I have found the "BrainStorm It" tool that comes with my Web host to be one of the very best in fact and I have written a previous post on that. To be honest I think just their analysis tools almost pay for the cost of the hosting.

Of the many other tools out there one of the most widely used is of course the legendary Wordtracker. Try Wordtracker for free.

Another source of niche markets are the magazines in bookshops or newsagents or news stands or online. Many people have found profitable niches in hobby areas by noticing that there were a lot of magazines selling on that topic, doing some research and finding a niche within that market. Others find niches by using tools such as Googles trends and insights tools at http://www.google.com/trends or the Google Hot Trends tool http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends and finally the Google Insights tool http://www.google.com/insights/search

Some talk of micro-niches, or long-tail marketing and I have mentioned long tail marketing before in a previous post. It is something that can work on the internet but is harder to make work in the offline world. But for some internet business owners such as myself understanding how to use the Long Tail of the market is crucial to success because we usually cannot compete with the large companies in the mass markets - they will simply outspend us on their campaigns. But not always! Click here to read more about Long Tail Marketing. There is an audio there as well.

Back to my latest campaign

Owen

Google AdWords

Google AdWords information can be found all over the net and of course one of the main places is Google itself at http://www.google.com/adwords and at the AdWords support site.

Today I came across a couple of useful additional items to help out.

The first is a video from the Chief Economist at Google and it explains AdWords in plain terms: Introduction to Google AdWords Auction. There are lots more at the Google YouTube Business Channel.

Google also has a blog dedicated to AdWords: Google AdWords Blog and lots of online help. There are of course many books on the topic that you can get as well. Amazon certainly has plenty on offer: Amazon Books. One book I am reading myself is entitled "Winning Results with Google Adwords" by Andrew Goodman.

And for those of you with a theoretical bent, maybe it is just me, here is a research paper from Standford analyzing the auction mechanisms behind AdWords: Standford Research Paper. This paper is only for those with a mathematical inclination and not for the faint of heart!

It pays to be careful with something like AdWords until you really know what you are doing and then it is a fantastically powerful marketing tool.

Owen