Freedom
Welcome to Unemployment is Freedom
This brief e-book will change the way you think about employment forever. If you have just lost your job or even if you just want to try something new then you really want to read this book. With the recession well into its second year and the economy spiraling downward, many look at this time in our nation’s history as a bleak period with little hope for the future. This could not be further from the truth. This is the time to seize new opportunities and finally use those skills that you have to make the kind of income you deserve. And best of all, you’ll enjoy a freedom like you’ve never felt before as you finally shake off the chains of employment that have held you down for so long.
This is your life …
How could this be happening to me? I did everything that I was supposed to do. I took the right courses in college. I put my time in working extra hours and never having time for my family. I even went to those stupid training seminars to keep my bosses happy.
• Now I don’t have a job.
• I got laid off and I’m living on unemployment.
• I can’t find a new job because everyone is laying people off.
• What am I going to do?
Stop feeling sorry for yourself
Stop spending all of that time lamenting what could have been and what should have been. You are not the only one who has lost their job recently. The country is in a recession and you are a casualty. You can wallow in self-pity if you like or you can look at your new found unemployment as the opportunity for freedom that you have been waiting for. Is it really such a bad thing that you are now being paid to stay home and enjoy some time with your loved ones?
The world is changing and you now have a chance to embark on a new adventure, an odyssey of self-discovery where you will find that your skills are worth more than what others have paid you for them in the past. You are now free to do what you want.
Chapter 1 – Meet John Q
John Q is a guy just like you and I who spent twenty years of his life after college working for the same company and gradually getting ahead in life. He owns a house in the suburbs, has two kids, a beautiful wife who stands by him no matter what, and a retirement fund that should allow him to live out his golden years in relative comfort. His stock portfolio is decent, not extensive or elaborate, but fairly diverse and his company has been giving him shares as part of his compensation package for about ten years now. On the surface, John Q is looking pretty good. He made all the right moves and it looks like life is paying off for him.
At least, it was before Thanksgiving of 2008
John Q left work the Wednesday before Thanksgiving never realizing that his life was about to change forever. He sat down with his family and ate a turkey dinner on Thursday, went Christmas shopping on Friday, and watched football Saturday and Sunday while relaxing in front of the fireplace. On Monday, he was told by his employer that he was getting laid off. Most of his company stock hadn’t vested yet, he’d be ineligible for an end of the year bonus, and after developing a lifestyle suited to his $100,000 a year job he would now have to live on $650 a week in unemployment.
The words “Bad Day” seemed like a serious understatement
On top of all that, John Q’s 401-K was only worth about thirty percent of what it had been valued at earlier in the year. The market had crashed in September and he was already reeling from the hit to what he thought was a secure part of his savings plan. The value of the house was down and he couldn’t sell it if he wanted to anyway because lending institutions and mortgage brokerages were both tightening their standards and not giving out loans or they were going under.
This is how John Q was going to end 2008. To him at that point all that he had done in his professional life had been in vain. His situation was hopeless and he had visions of his children starving as he begged for food and spare change. He began his journey home on that bitterly cold Monday and prepared himself to tell his wonderful wife what had happened to their perfect life and what they would now have to sacrifice just to survive. She greeted him at the door, knowing immediately there was something wrong and listened patiently as he laid it out for her. To his surprise, she smiled and took his hands in hers, saying the words that he needed to hear. “You’re free,” she said. “Now you can finally do what you really want to do in life.”
Free to Do What You Want
You know what I would really like? I would like for someone to pay me to sit at home and spend some time doing the things that I’m good at and enjoy most in life. That’s what I’d like. Do you know what they call that? It’s known as Unemployment.
Getting laid off and collecting unemployment can be the best thing that has ever happened to you if you use your time productively. Everyone has a set of skills that they can hone and develop into money-making tools which can give you the freedom and financial independence of self employment.
You never have to be in this situation again. You got here because you relied on a system that seemed infallible to bring you success and happiness in life. The only way you can truly achieve this is by taking your life back and controlling your income yourself. You can do this by using the skills that you have and offering them to others who do not have them. It’s as simple as that.
How do you do this? In the pages of this book we will show you step by step how to evaluate your skills, find something that you love doing, and do that for a living. There’s an old saying about employment that says, “If you do what you love for a job you’ll never work a day in your life.” That’s what this book is all about. Your unemployment is an opportunity to finally do what you love for a living. We’re going to help you find out what that is and show you how to market it.
What did John Q do?
John Q, with some encouragement from his wife and family, decided to take advantage of his new found freedom. After taking some time off to enjoy the holidays he sat down with his laptop and made a plan. That plan, in just three short months, has changed his life forever. We have outlined it for you in this book, step by step, in a way that anyone can follow. Your key to success is right here in front of you. There is nothing complicated about it and there are no “magic bullets” or “secret formulas” that will make you an instant overnight phenomenon. This program is about common sense. Figure out what you have to offer and we’ll show you how to get the word out and finally do what you love for a living. If you want to go back to being a slave to someone else’s way of doing things then stop reading right now. If you want freedom, read on and we’ll show you how to get it.
Chapter 2 – The First Step: Evaluating Yourself
What do you like to do and what are you good at in life? This is the most important question to ask yourself when you prepare to embark on this journey. The whole point of unemployment freedom is to find something you enjoy and do that for a living. You need a marketable skill and there is a roadmap out there to determine what that skill is. It’s called online classifieds.
Online classifieds are websites where you can advertise products and services for free. The most well-known is a site called Craig’s List. As of the writing of this book it is the tenth most visited site on the internet according to Alexa, the company that rates those kinds of things. Your skill list is on the home page for every city in the world. Here’s what you need to do to check it out:
1) Go to www.craigslist.org
2) Click on the link for your city
3) Look at the “services” section
4) Copy and paste (or just write down) all of the categories in that section
The list you come up with will look like this:
Beauty, computer, creative, erotic, event, financial, legal, lessons, automotive, household, labor/move, skilled trade, real estate, small biz ads, therapeutic, travel/vacation, writing/editing/translation
There are other classified sites on the web such as Backpage and Kijiji, but Craig’s List is by far the largest and most successful so you probably want to tailor your new business idea to fit into one of these categories. They’re pretty broad and you can look at each of the ads posted in these areas to see what others are offering. Don’t be afraid of duplicating someone else’s idea. There’s a gigantic world out there on the web and there’s room for everyone. We’ll be covering marketing in a later chapter.
Time to Start Smiling Again
Think about this: You just found a site where you can post a free ad for a skill that you already have. You could stop right here and start making a part-time income just advertising that skill and checking your email everyday. Even without a website, there will be someone out there who will hire you. Of course, we’re not going to stop here. Your goal isn’t a part-time income. It’s a new career.
What did John Q do?
John Q looked at the categories on Craig’s List and chose the last one on the list: writing/editing/translation. He had written for his school newspaper in college and had kept a journal throughout his professional career. It was something that he enjoyed doing and he could feel the freedom that he knew he would have with a writing career, working in sweatpants and slippers, setting his own hours, traveling when he felt like it, having time for his family. This unemployment thing wasn’t so bad after all. He made his career decision, closed his laptop for the day, and went downstairs with a smile on his face to tell his wife the news.
Chapter 3 – Names, Domains and Email Addresses
Now that you know what you are going to do, you need to come up with a way to tell everyone that you are doing it. As mentioned in the last chapter, you could just post ads on the classifieds and field requests via email, but you would lose a lot of potential customers that way. There are always a few people that will hire someone on faith, but most prefer to see something in writing before they spend money on it. You need to set up a website if you are going to be successful on the internet and the first step towards doing this is selecting a name for yourself and buying a domain for it.
A domain, for the computer novice, is that www thing that you put into your top search box when you want to go to a specific location. For Craig’s List its www.craigslist.com. For you, it can be anything you like provided that someone else isn’t already using it. Make a list of half a dozen names that you think would be a good fit for you. Here are a few guidelines you should follow when creating it:
1) Don’t get too fancy. You want the company name to state clearly what you do. If you’re a writing service, use the term “writing” in your company name.
2) Don’t make your company name too long. You want people to be able to remember it and not be aggravated every time they have to type it out.
3) Don’t be so attached to a specific name that you settle for a .net or .org domain when you could change it a bit and get the much more powerful .com.
Once you have your list, you can go to www.godaddy.com and enter each name into the domain search box. There are other sites that offer domains for sale and some of them may be more inexpensive, but Go Daddy is the best and the biggest and they have tools such as Traffic Blazer which will come in handy later on. They also offer hosting for your website which you will need very soon so it’s a good move to get your domain through them, its one-stop shopping.
E-Mail Addresses
This is the easy part, right? Just go to Google or Yahoo and get a free email address? You can do that if you like, but there are a few things you should know about email addresses before you attach one to your new business venture. The first and most important is that when you use one of these free emails from the search engines you do not own them. They are generally secure and you can access them from anywhere so there are benefits, but the rights to those email addresses belong to the company you get them through. Yahoo email addresses are owned by Yahoo and gmail is owned by Google. The likelihood of you losing those addresses or those companies going out of business is slim but nothing is impossible. Choosing a private email address, like one attached to your new domain, might be a better choice here. Here are a few facts about email addresses to help you make your choice:
• Gmail spam filters are some of the best out there. To avoid excessive junk mail there is no one better
• Yahoo has a simple folder and filter system which can help you organize your company emails if you have more than one product or service being offered. You can also set up a folder for each client and have mail automatically directed into that folder
• Gmail has a mail forwarding function which is free. With Yahoo, you have to upgrade to get that
• Go Daddy email addresses are free when you purchase a domain and they have all of the features that yahoo and gmail offer plus the added benefit of an auto-responder. An auto-responder is a function where you can put in a stock message which will be sent to everyone who sends you an email. They are particularly good for e-commerce product websites.
• Private email addresses like Go Daddy are set up in the following format: name@domain.com. Free emails are name@yahoo.com or name@gmail.com. The private emails give more of an impression of size and professionalism.
Free Email for Advertising
Free email addresses, particularly gmail’s, are very useful for advertising purposes. If you have different offers out there or need to post multiple ads on classified sites that only allow one posting per email then you’ll want to set up a number of free emails. Gmail, with its free mail-forwarding feature, is ideal for this because you can use multiple ads and have them all forward to one central email to be fielded and responded to.
Chapter 4 – Creating Your Profile and Designing Your Website
Here’s what you have accomplished so far:
• You have made a new career choice using a skill you already have
• You know at least one area where you can market that skill (Craig’s List)
• You have selected a domain name and purchased it from Go Daddy
• You have selected an email provider and set up a company email address
You’re doing pretty well for someone who not so long ago was feeling sorry for themselves. Are you beginning to see why we call this book “Unemployment Freedom”? Let’s check in on John Q and see what he is up to.
John Q Update
John Q, after a nice dinner and relaxing evening with his family, is up bright and early the next day and ready to work. Having a purpose gives him an energy level that he hasn’t had since before Thanksgiving. He reviews his notes:
Skill: Writing
Advertising: CL Services: write/ed/tr8
Domain Name: www.JohnQWriting.com
Email: JohnQ@JohnQWriting.com
Now it was time to start writing his profile for his website. Knowing that he would think better with a little exercise first, he throws his sweats on (the work-out pair) and heads off to the gym. This was part of his new found freedom. He could now work out when he wanted to and not when his work schedule would allow.
Creating Your Profile
If you’re a writer like John Q then creating a profile is not a difficult undertaking. If you’re not, do not fear. We are about to introduce you to the wonderful world of outsourcing. There are hundreds of sites that offer writing services out there. You can find a writer on Craig’s List or you can go to www.Elance.com or www.Odesk.com to find writers who will bid on your project. The writers who register on these sites are from around the world so make sure you ask for writing samples before you hire anyone. For this phase, you might want to stick to the classifieds and hire local, but register on both outsourcing sites because you may be using them for work yourself later on.
An Introduction to Keywords
Pay very close attention to this section. Keywords are the most important element of any website. They help determine your position in search engine rankings and direct traffic towards your website. If you are running an automotive repair service and you are using keywords that make you look like an auto sales company then you will not be successful. Remember the following statement: Keywords are the Key.
If you are writing your own profile, begin by writing down the category that you have chosen and a list of what you have to offer. Then get a thesaurus at the book store and start looking for synonyms. Follow that exercise with looking for synonyms for the synonyms. Get a list of twenty or thirty words together and then go to: www.adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Enter each of the words you came up with during your Thesaurus search and let Google do the rest. They’ll provide you with a list of keywords and statistics on the traffic that each one gets. Copy that list and incorporate as much of it as possible into your profile text.
If you are hiring someone else to write your profile then you should make sure that they have a working knowledge of how keywords work. There is also an issue called “keyword density” that you need to be careful of here. It is recommended that you use a keyword no more than seven times in a five hundred word document. Any more than that could be considered spamming by the search engines. You should also use a keyword in the title at the top of the page and the opening sentence.
*Important Note: If you don’t quite understand the concept of keywords and traffic right now, don’t worry about it. Follow this step as it is laid out and things will become clearer as you get deeper into this book.
Designing Your Website
You are now ready to design your website. Once again, if this happens to be your skill you won’t have any problem with it. If you need help with it, you can go to Elance, Odesk, or hire off of Craig’s List. You don’t need much to get started. Design a basic site using your profile document to create an “about us” page. Use your keyword list to create a “home page” and make sure that your message is clear. Special effects like flash banners might look good but they don’t sell what you have to offer. Consumers are looking for companies that are straightforward and have websites that are easy to understand, especially in this economic climate. Trust is a major factor in decision making, so be upfront and put yourself in the shoes of those who will be visiting your website.
The Landing Page
The term “landing page” refers to the page that visitors will land on when they click the link that you advertise. Typically this page is the home page, but you may want to have different landing pages for different offers. For instance, our friend John Q offers “article writing” and “content writing”. He may want to advertise those services together or separate them and measure the response. To do this, he would need two different landing pages, one for each service. This would need to be incorporated into his website design.
The “Services” Page
The “Services” page is where you list the services that you offer. They should be itemized and each one should be explained in detail. Once again, be up front. Make sure that your clients know exactly what you are offering when they hire you. You can list prices on your services page but when you first start out it’s probably a better idea to leave them out. You want to have the luxury of being able to quote each customer individually. The services page is also a good place to list services that you offer through others. John Q, knowing that web design would go hand in hand with content writing, found a web designer to subcontract that type of work, so he was able to list “web design” as a service he can offer. We’ll cover outsourcing in greater detail later on.
If you are offering multiple services and using different landing pages for each you can still have a main services page where you list everything. Have your individual pages branch off a main list page so you can run ads for multiple or individual services.
The “Contact Us” Page
The “Contact Us” page is where you put your business address, email address, and phone number for potential and existing clients to contact you. Don’t just throw you cell phone number on to this page and figure you’ll handle all the calls personally. Set up another phone number with a voice mail and use an email address that is not being used for anything else. If you have domain-based private emails, have an info or inquiry email drop-box with an auto-responder. If you’re using free email then set up a separate one for your “contact us” page.
If you want to add the illusion of size to your new company, you can set up departments and have different emails for each. It doesn’t matter if all of them are forwarded to the same place. You can be a one-man operation and look like a major corporation on the internet.
Chapter 5 – Putting it All Together
There is only one more piece left before you have completed the set-up process and can launch your new business venture. This is perhaps the most important element in the whole process. You need to have a way to get paid. All of this is for naught if you can’t make any money off it.
Paypal
There are many ways to get paid over the internet when you are selling a product or service, but the most secure and recommended is Paypal. It is the preferred payment method of Ebay, Elance, Odesk, Go Daddy, and countless others on the web and it is easy to set up. Follow these steps:
1) Set up a separate email address as your Paypal id
2) Go to www.paypal.com and follow the set-up steps
3) Attach your Paypal account to a bank account and confirm it with Paypal
4) Upgrade to a premier or business account
5) Set up a shopping cart on your website (if applicable)
Shopping carts are typically only for e-commerce sites that sell products but you can use one for a service site if you have itemized pricing on your “services” page. This can be a nice addition to your site and allow you to fully automate your operations at some point. We’ll cover more about automation later on.
Hosting
Once all the pieces are in place, including your payment method, you can contact your hosting company and launch your website. If you followed the steps we outlined in Chapter 3 then you should already have this company in place. If you have a Go Daddy domain then you can use them for hosting. You can purchase the hosting credit on your account and then you upload your site. If you don’t know how to do this yourself then have your web designer do it for you. It should be included in the price as part of their service. If you’re using an outsourced web designer that you haven’t dealt with before, change your passwords when they are done and make sure they create an admin page for you where you can make changes on your site yourself.
John Q Review
John Q sits once again in front of his laptop at the end of the day reviewing his notes. His business plan now looks like this:
Skill: Writing
Advertising: CL Services: write/ed/tr8
Domain Name: www.JohnQWriting.com
Email: JohnQ@JohnQWriting.com
Web Designer: Elance Outsource
Website Pages
Home
About Us
Services
• Article Writing
• Content Writing
Contact Us
Hosting: Go Daddy
Payment Method: Paypal
Paypal Id: Payments@JohnQWriting.com
It’s the end of his first week in business and he already has a new outlook on life. John worked out every day this week and spent every evening with his family. He didn’t have to deal with crowded airports or subway trains and he didn’t have to listen to his already demanding boss demand even more. There is a sense of peace in his life that just wasn’t there before.
The unemployment check came in this afternoon and for the first time John Q saw it for what it truly was, a ticket to freedom. He was getting paid to set up a new business for himself. That smile, which was becoming a permanent fixture on his face, appeared again as he closed the laptop, shut the light off, and went downstairs to his wife and children. Life really was good and it was slowly getting better. “Turn off the news, honey,” he said to his wife, “the country might be in a recession but we’re going to do just fine.”
Chapter 6 – Understanding Search Engines
Search engines are entities such as Google and Yahoo which direct traffic towards your website. They work using algorithms that determine which websites should be listed at the top of a search page and which should be at the bottom. Understanding the elements that are considered in these algorithmic formulas will help you develop your marketing strategy. One of the most comprehensive programs we have seen on the subject is at www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/. It’s a tutorial designed for people who want to know more about Adwords but it gives a very user-friendly synopsis about search engines.
To summarize the details here, you need to look at the following elements to organize a successful internet marketing campaign:
1) The content of your website: Your content needs to be relevant to the product or service that you are offering. This goes for the words under the words also, your html tags. Attempting to fool the search engines by putting in false tags or white text will not help your search rankings.
2) The keywords in both your content and your URL. Domains that have the service offered in their title do better in search rankings than those that don’t. For instance, www.JohnQWriting.com versus www.JohnQEnterprises.com.
3) The number of visitors you get and the number of other sites that have a link going back to your website. These are called Back-links and they are a very big factor in giving you a higher page rank
Relevance
Relevance is an issue that has caused search engine technology to develop rapidly in the past five years. In the past, you could change your html tags or put text into your site that was the same color as the background so only the search engine robots could read it. The search engines have found a way to combat these techniques by putting less weight into the html tags and more into the actual content. They have also instituted a penalty on duplicate content for those who think they can simply copy and paste from other people’s websites. In other words, write your own content and keep it straightforward and honest if you want to attain higher page ranks.
Relevance is also important when it comes to clients. Consumers are not gullible when doing business on the internet. It’s no longer a new concept. Those who take short-cuts and use questionable marketing strategies do not do well these days, especially in light of the recent credit crash.
Keyword Marketing
Your keywords should be right on if you followed the steps outlined in Chapter 4 when you wrote your profile and designed your website. There are ways that you can use those keywords for marketing your service. One of them is pay-per-click, which we will cover later on. Another is article marketing. This has become a popular way to target specific keywords and use them to drive traffic back to your site. Read the next section on Back Links for further information.
Back Links
It’s time to open your mind up a little further. Visualize a giant spider-web. At the center is your website. The strands that fan out from your site are links and they connect you to other sites. Some of them are links that connect those sites back to your site. Those are your Back Links. Search engine algorithms put heavy weight on the number of back links you have, so building them should be an important part of your marketing strategy. You can do it yourself until you start to make some money with your new company, but it is recommended that you hire someone who knows what they are doing once you achieve some financial success. Here are some simple ways you can do it yourself:
Posting: Posting is a good way to build back links and it is usually inexpensive or free. You can post ads on billboards, classified sites, or in online publications and they will register as back links
Link Exchanges: You’ll start to get offers to do this almost immediately after you launch your website. The concept is simple. You put a link for someone else on your site and they put yours on theirs. Remember when you do this that you are affiliating yourself with someone else so you don’t want to just link with anyone.
Article Marketing: This is a great way to build back links and get quality traffic back to your site. Write a five hundred word article using your keywords about a subject that is related to your industry. Go to an article directory site and post it. One of the most visited is www.ezinearticles.com. It’s free.
Another John Q Smile
John Q ended his second week in business with that smile now a common site to not only his wife and family but to his friends at the gym as well. He had signed his first client through a classified ad on Craig’s List and gotten a second by word of mouth. The dream had become a reality and it was going to get even better from here.
Chapter 7 – Content Management Systems
Content management systems are tools that should be developed for you by your web designer and used to change or update content on your website. If you have not been provided with one you need to ask your designer to implement one at this point. In the upcoming chapters we will be talking about marketing mediums and how to drive traffic to your website. Some of these strategies may require that you change content or add pages. A content management system will make this a lot easier for you. You won’t have to pay a web designer every time you make a change and you can experiment as much as you like with new landing pages and different products or services.
Chapter 8 – Classifieds and Other Free Advertising
If you’ve been reading this book from the beginning then you already know about the power of Craig’s List. There is a company called Alexa that assigns a rating to each website on the internet. Currently, Craig’s List is number ten on their list and gets millions of visitors every day. They cover cities and countries around the world and their advertising is absolutely free. If you haven’t already done so, post an ad on Craig’s List right now. Here are some tips about how to use free classifieds:
Phone Verified Accounts:
To advertise in the service section of Craig’s List you need to have a phone verified account. Craig’s List has very strict guidelines about posting ads in multiple cities and the phone verification process is one of the security measures they have adopted in the last two years. You only have to verify your email address once and then you can use it as often as you like, as long as you follow guidelines. If you have a home phone and a cell phone you can verify them separately and open two accounts, but you’ll have to use two different emails. You can add a third if you have a fax number.
Phone verified accounts can be purchased from different companies that specialize in posting and you can pay these companies to do your posting for you. There are also software programs which you can use that are designed to get around Craig’s List security measures, enabling you to post in multiple cities. Think carefully before you use these and never use email addresses or an IP address that you plan on doing business with. If Craig’s List flags your home or main office IP address then you will never be able to use it again to post ads there. You’re better off opening two or three accounts of your own and managing your ads.
Duplicate Ads
Craig’s List, Backpage and Kijiji all have rules against multiple postings and duplicate content. You can’t just write one ad and post it in every city in the world. There are ways to get around this, like using image ads or software that scrambles ads with html which doesn’t show up, but again you’re risking a ban from a site that is free and produces a great response. Your ads will be flagged if you use the same content, e-mail address, or URL more than once. Repeated abuse of this policy will result in termination of your account or a ban on your email and IP address.
Writing Your Ad
Take a look at the ads that are already posted in your service section and grab a few ideas for a headline. Again, straightforward tactics work very well here. For instance, the subject line “Writing Service has Article and Content Writing Available at a Fair Price” is much clearer than “Learn About the Benefits of the Written Word”. The second one might sound cool but the first title will get you more business and it will be quality traffic, not people inquiring because your ad wasn’t clear. Forget flashy. You’re in this to make money, not put on a show.
The body of the ad should be the same. Be clear about what you have to offer and don’t worry about how many words you use to describe it. Keep paragraphs separate and short, three lines at the most. You want potential clients to get a snapshot of your business when they look at your ad. Classified sites have millions of visitors and those who are going to that section are looking for a specific service. Let them know in your ad if you can provide it.
Multiple Email Addresses and Domains (Tips and Tricks)
Here’s a very simple classified strategy for the new internet marketer.
• Set up three new gmail addresses
• Buy three new domains from Go Daddy
• Write three ads for each gmail address / domain combination
• Phone verify each gmail address with your cell, home, or fax number
Use the “domain forwarding” function from Go Daddy and have each of the three new domains forward to your website. Use gmail forwarding to run all the gmail addresses into a fourth and you have all ad responses coming to one place. Run one ad per address per day (Use a different domain on each) and you’ll start getting responses in no time.
Chapter 9 – Buying Traffic with Pay-Per-Click
If you did the reading about Adwords that was suggested in Chapter 6 then you already have had an introduction to pay-per-click. Adwords is Google’s version of PPC advertising and it is rated fairly high on the effectiveness list for this type of marketing campaign. Google provides you a number of tools to understand it and use it properly. You should go through these thoroughly before you attempt pay-per-click. It can get expensive if you don’t do it right.
Choosing Your Keywords
Guess what? You’re already prepared for this if you followed the steps outlined in this book from the beginning. Your keyword list should still be lying around someplace. You used it when you wrote your profile and had your “about us” and “home page” developed. If you can’t find it, go to the keyword tool again which can be found at: www.adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
This time, you can enter the URL for your website and see if the keywords that come up are the same as the ones you wanted in the first place. If not, use your content management system and tweak it a bit to get those words in there. Change a few sentences around and count the number of times your keywords are present in your content. You don’t have to be a Pulitzer prize-winning author to re-write and get the result that you’re looking for.
Bidding
This is the part where PPC can become expensive. You need to bid on your keywords and that bid has to be high enough to trigger an ad. The minimum bid price is determined by Google based on the popularity of the keyword and the “quality score” of your website. This quality score is based on content relevance. Did you follow that suggestion earlier when we said make sure your content is relevant to your product or service? This is where that pays off.
There are different schools of thought on bidding. Some believe that you should bid high in the beginning to get the traffic moving and then cut those bids down after a while. It’s kind of like priming a pump. Others believe you should just bid the minimum to get ad appearances, or impressions. Both methods work and which you use will be dependent upon how much you want to spend.
Cost Per Impression
You can also bid and pay for pay-per-click based on cost per impression. This means that you pay a fee, usually less than a keyword PPC, for every time your ad appears. This can be effective if you know that you’ll get a good response on an ad or have a large budget to get a message out there. A good example would be a promotional ad or flyer that you’re planning on spending a set amount of money on.
Cost Control / Daily Budget
There is a scientific method you can use when launching pay-per-click marketing campaigns but in a lot of ways it’s like playing the lottery. You play the same number every day and hope at some point it will come up. Those who do that know that whatever they spend on lottery tickets is pretty much lost money. Any win is a windfall and unexpected. This is how you need to look at PPC. Figure out what you can afford to spend every week, set a certain time frame for a beginning of the campaign and an end of the campaign, and then evaluate the results when you are done. Most can afford to spend $25 a week for four weeks and you’ll get a good idea at the end of that if it’s worth spending $50 a week next month. Use the daily budget tools incorporated into Adwords and set your spending limits before you begin.
Writing Your Ads
Adwords has limits to the number of characters that you can use in an ad. Review these limits and practice writing ads that are direct and to the point in as little words as possible. Use the same principles you applied in your content writing and classified advertising. Be direct and let people know exactly what you have to offer. This is even more important with pay-per-click because you don’t want people clicking on your ad who have no interest in your service.
Adsense
Adsense is another program put together by Google which you can use to make an additional income with your website. If you look at sites where your adwords ads are appearing and see how they are set up you will get a general idea of what adsense will look like on your website. Google pays you to display other people’s ads and you can collect a small, but steady income from allowing them to do so. Think it over before you sign up, though. Some feel that promoting other companies on their site takes away from the quality or image that they are trying to project.
Chapter 10 – Social Networking
If you want traffic to come to your website then put your website in front of the flow of traffic. Here are two avenues that definitely qualify as high traffic areas: MySpace and Facebook. The power of these two social networks has been well-documented in recent years and tapping into them with the right product or service can bring you a ton of traffic. Here are some tips about social networking:
PPC for Social Networks
Adwords has a function where you can choose where you want your ads to appear. This allows you to be selective and only connect with certain demographics that you feel will be productive for you. It also works in reverse. You can select MySpace and Facebook and reach absolutely everyone on those networks. Watch your tracking on Adwords when you do this and you will see a big surge in impressions.
MySpace and Facebook also have their own PPC campaigns and Facebook allows you to share links with all your friends. MySpace is more geared towards personal agendas like dating but it can be useful also if you have a large number of friends. You can send out bulletins and post messages to anyone in your network. You can also communicate on both networks in a way that makes all your postings public, a good way to spread the word when you’re working on a new project.
Twitter, Tagged and Others
Social networking has become so popular that new networks are springing up almost daily. Two of the more powerful ones (behind the Big Two) are Twitter and Tagged. There are also specialty social networks that are designed for specific groups. There are women’s networks, men’s network’s, and networks for certain professions, even alternative lifestyle networks. The list goes on and on. Do a little research on the subject and you will probably find a social network for your profession or those who need your services. For instance, John Q is on a network for web designers, knowing that they’ll need a writer at some point.
What about John Q?
John Q, as you may have guessed, is a character created to help you understand the process of how to start your own internet business. The business described here is real and thriving right now. If you would like to learn more about how to start an internet business of your own Click Here
