Wow! It’s been a while since I wrote another installment of this series. But that’s a function of my coaching student’s busy life schedule. He was finishing up a masters in education and then had a bit of a career path crisis. But, he’s back on track now and chugging along on his first website.

I am a little behind, though, even so in reporting Jim’s progress. When I last left you, he was brainstorming the structure/outline of his site. It’s an important step, so you need to take your time. You want your site to be organized in a logical fashion that is user-friendly. At the same time, you need to organize it so that it maximizes the search engine potential. Jim chose to do it by getting a large piece of poster board and laying out his structure in an organizational chart fashion.

He used post it notes to label each page and the associated keywords, so that he can make changes if he needs to. He’s a visual person, and this seems to work for him.

After that, Jim got started on building his site. Every site needs to start with a design, or template. In SBI, this is fairly easy. You just go to the Look & Feel Selector, and you can choose from over 100 different designs. And among those, you can do further customization, even if you have no graphic skills. Jim has me, though, and I took one of the SBI designs & overlaid a photograph and logo text on it to make it uniquely his.

So, once he had a design, it was time to build the home page. Here are some essential points about a home page on a content site like Jim’s:

• It needs to have a strong “voice”, meaning basically… personality, your personality. Don’t be impersonal or standoffish… people won’t connect with you that way.
• It needs to communicate what your site is about and what’s in it for the reader… why should they click through to the rest of your site?
• It needs to not have advertising. People don’t want to be hit with ads as soon as they enter a content site. They want information. Nor do you want to give them an opportunity to click off your site before you’ve fully drawn them in.
• It doesn’t need to be more than 350 to 500 words… just enough to get your Most Wanted Response (MWR), which should be to click through, or maybe to subscribe to your ezine or mailing list.

Your home page should set the tone for the whole rest of your site, and you DO want to connect with your readers. Revealing at least a bit of your personal background helps, especially if you can show that you truly understand where the reader is coming from. Talk from your heart, and write like you talk. This is not Wikipedia and you are not lecturing.

After you build your home page, it’s a good idea to get the Contact page up fairly soon, so that if you DO happen to get any visitors (it doesn’t usually happen right away, but you never know), they can communicate with you if they want. NOTE: Don’t ever post your actual email address on a page, or you WILL get spammed. Trust me; I know. Put a form up on the page. Again, SBI makes this easy as pie with their FormBuildIt module.

Another great page to start out with is your About Me page. Here’s your chance to reveal a bit more about yourself. Really allow your readers to get to know you. This is a powerful technique that will contribute to your eventual success with your site. The Web is an impersonal place. Make yourself real.

And once you lay that foundation for your site, then get busy writing your actual content! This is where Jim is now. He’s so in love with his site, he’s having trouble actually buckling down and writing the meat. But he’ll get there…

To your success,

Well, it’s been a while since I posted here, but that’s because this next step has been taking Jim quite a while to do. But it’s such an important one, I don’t want to rush him. Developing your keyword-supported site plan is essential to the future success of your site.

Here’s an overview of the steps involved:

• Brainstorm the topics and subtopics you want to cover in relation to your niche concept
• Organize these ideas into logical “chapters” and “subchapters”
• Find profitable in demand keywords (I recommend 3 per page) to match your planned content on each of the topic and subtopic pages

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It’s not, though. So take your time with it.

When Jim’s finally ready to move on, I’ll post another installment here…

To you success,

Today, we’ll examine finalizing your niche and choosing a domain name. It’s important not to do this too quickly. In Jim’s initial keyword research, he proved his niche concept. In other words, he validated that there is sufficient demand in his topic. He also confirmed that, though there IS competition, it’s not so great that he has no chance of making his own mark in the niche. Those are important factors.

Next, we need to make sure the niche is robust enough to support the development of at least 50 pages of content on our website. I asked Jim to look at this in a couple of ways…

1. First, do a rough site plan to map out what topics and subtopics you want to cover.
2. Second, look at your keyword list. Can you pick out enough different keywords to support all your topics? If not, do some more research, using lateral searches, etc. to see if you can find enough potentially profitable keywords.

If, like Jim, your site plan and keyword analysis supports the viability of your chosen niche for a content website, you’re good to go. If not, you may need to either widen your focus a bit, or consider an altogether different niche. Conversely, you want to make sure your niche isn’t so broad that it will be hard to truly capture one target audience. You can’t be all things to all people. A tightly focused niche is always going to be your best bet.

So, once Jim had finally chosen a niche, confirmed it is a valid choice for him, and proved it’s robust enough to keep him occupied for some time writing content, I asked him to step back one last time before he leaps and ask himself… “Is this a niche I am excited enough about to stay motivated for a good long time in writing and developing the content?”

Be brutally honest with yourself. If you’re at all lukewarm about your niche topic, then I guarantee you… sooner or later, it’s going to feel like torture to have to keep writing page after page. On the other hand, if you’re especially knowledgeable on the topic and/or filled with passion about it, it’s almost like a labor of love, as the words come flowing out, one page after another.

OK, so Jim assured me that he is indeed passionate about his topic. He has tons of ideas for the site and sees it as an opportunity to launch a sort of grass roots movement. Good for him! I feel excited just listening to him.

So now, we’re ready to start thinking about a domain name for his content site. The first step is to go back to the keyword list and choose a keyword that has great demand and solid profitability potential PLUS is general enough to represent the niche content theme. Once you have that, you’re ready to start thinking of a domain name. A domain should:

• contain your main keyword phrase (maybe even a couple for added strength)
• also say something about what your site offers
• not infringe on any trademarks or copyrighted names

The debate continues to rage over whether to separate words with dashes or underscores or to run them all together. I happen to prefer dashes, as I believe it makes it easier for search engines to pick out the individual words.

When you have some ideas in mind, then go to a domain registrar (GoDaddy.com is my all time favorite!) and find out if your domain name of choice is available. If not, amend it as needed and try again. Just be sure you keep your main keyword!

Jim was successful with his first choice, so he got it registered and was on to the next step… planning a detailed, keyword-supported site plan.

Today, I’ll start to explore Jim’s odyssey to Internet marketing success. As mentioned in my last post, Jim has chosen the online home business model of a content site. It’s one of the easiest methods for a newbie to use and it’s my specialty.

The first step in starting a content site is to select the niche you want to build it around. Content sites must be tightly focused. Too broad a topic will prevent you from getting the search engines to see you as an authority site, an essential designation for success in search engine listings. You’ve heard the adage, “Jack of all trades, master of none?” That applies to a content site too. For a content site to succeed, you have to be seen as a master of a specific topic.

So, the first step in selecting your niche is keyword research. This can serve a couple of purposes:

• If you have no idea what niche you want to use, keyword research can help you hone in on your areas of interest to find one that is shared by lots of other people.
• If you already know what niche you want to use, it can help you prove that you’re not the only one who is interested in the topic.

You MUST prove your concept BEFORE you start building your site. There’s nothing worse than having a passion for a topic, spending weeks or months building your content, and then finding out hardly anyone else on the Web is looking for that information. It doesn’t matter how strongly you feel about the topic; you HAVE to be sure others share your passion, or all your hard work will be for naught.

When you start to look at keywords, you need to keep in mind  3 factors:

1. How much demand is there for the topic? You’re looking for monthly search numbers in the thousands, if possible.
2. How much competition is there, i.e., existing content sites already established?
3. What is the potential profitability (which you can roughly calculate by comparing competition/supply to demand)?

Jim was fortunate… he already had a niche in mind, and his keyword research revealed that it’s viable… tons of demand and very little supply at the moment. So he proved his concept and is now ready to move forward.

By the way, a good keyword research tool is essential. The gold standard is WordTracker and they do have a great free keyword tool: Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool

I find their metrics a bit complex to understand, though. If you’re looking for free, here’s another great free tool, called SearchIt: http://www.searchit.sitesell.com/

But what I use most for my keyword research is also from the same folks who produced SearchIt. It’s part of a robust platform for building super successful content sites, called Site Build It, or SBI for short. One of the key features of SBI is their Brainstormer tool. It quickly provides tons of keyword research data, with easy to understand numbers and flexibility with analysis of the numbers. Check out SBI here.

In the coming installments of this case study, I’ll be talking a lot about the many features of SBI. It’s how I built my main site that this blog appears on, as well as 4 other sites. And it’s extremely newbie friendly, which makes it perfect for Jim too.

That’s it for today. Next time, we’ll look at narrowing down the niche, and selecting a domain name.

To your success,

I thought a great way to educate people on how to succeed in internet marketing of an online home business would be to chronicle a case study, from start to (hopefully) successful finish. I am mentoring a friend of mine, a man named Jim, who is a complete newbie in home-based business on the Web. But he’s watched me grow & succeed over the past 7 years, and he wants in. He’s set himself a goal to make $100K a year by the end of the year so he can quite his J.O.B. (just over broke job) and enjoy total financial freedom.

I believe he can do it. He possesses immense creativity, a strong work ethic and the enthusiasm & motivation he needs to succeed.

The model he has chosen for an online home business is the one I’ve been most successful with… a content site. He has an emerging trend that is a huge passion for him and he’ll be starting a site about that niche topic.

Here are the general steps I’ll be taking him through:

• Researching & selecting a niche
• Planning the content topics & “voice”
• Building an organized and visually-pleasing website
• Optimizing for the search engines
• Driving traffic to the site via free traffic generation strategies
• Building a mailing list
• Adding community through interactivity & perhaps a membership component
• Monetizing the site through a variety of methods, including Google AdSense, affiliate marketing, and selling his own products
• Continuous improvement

As the months go on, you can come back here and read of Jim’s progress. In my next case study post, look for a rundown on the research and niche selection I’m putting Jim through. I guarantee you can learn from watching Jim grow!

To your success,
Kathi