A while back I wrote Tips for Graphic Designers Starting Out in Indianapolis, but recently I ran across an article by Meg Robichaud entitled, Everything I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Freelancing that I think does a much better job of explaining exactly what to do when starting out freelancing as a graphic designer.

Admittedly, I winced a little bit when she wrote, “Let’s be clear. I have to laugh when every blog about freelancing starts off with ‘I quit my job so I could work for myself, and be my own boss.’”, considering that’s kind of what I did here and here, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know – and now I know – and can agree with what Meg is trying to say. Here’s what she says:

“Be awesome. Tell everyone.” – Make something good and let the world know (specifically your future clients and/or employers know) via Twitter, by blogging, on Forrst.com, Scoutzie.com, and Dribbble.com.

“Stop waiting for them to come to you, just go to them.” – If you want to get new clients or land a new job, go to the company you’re want to work for and ask to work for them. Show them your work and how you can help them out. Make it about them, not you.

There’s other stuff about time tracking and time management, but it really boils down to those these two points: 1) Do something. 2) Ask people if they want it. If you repeat that all day long, you’re going to be a success. The hard part for some people is:

a) Not being able to span the gap of time between needing to be financially successful and not being financially stable. You might have to do some things you don’t love to survive.

b) Not knowing what to produce to show people. Because you can make anything for anyone, you have no constraints, which makes it hard to choose something. Choose something and go.

c) Asking people for things when there is a possibility of the answer being no is hard. Fear of rejection is even harder for some people. Put yourself in a position where they need you.

In closing, nothing worth doing is going to be easy and there is no one out there who is going to do this for you. This isn’t a video game where you click on a business and wait for a status bar to fill up your bank account. Life is messy. And fun. Do your best and you’ll get the most out of it.

Recently I’ve been rethinking how I feel about work and jobs. As you may or may not know, I help business owners solve technology and marketing problems, which gives me some freedom to choose who I work with and when. I don’t have fixed hours and if I work more, I can get paid more, but it’s not all roses and cherry blossoms.

When you run your own business, while you may earn more, much of your work is doubled or even tripled. Not only do you have to do the work, but you have to go earn it, and then process all the finances, documentation, and taxes on the back end. In a traditional job environment the work is handed to you and you just do it. When it’s done, someone else processes it. Your work is finite and so is your pay.

A Paradigm Shifts Again

For ten years I worked full time jobs in banking and technology, and I always would told myself I’d be happier running my own business until one day I did. I started off running it on the side in 2007 and in 2011 I finally went full time. I do web design with HTML, CSS, and WordPress, email support with web hosts and Google Apps, and computer and network support for Microsoft products like Windows and Server 2003/2008.

While I have been successful at running my own business, there are two reasons why I’ve recently began applying for jobs in the Indianapolis market. The first reason is because I realized that the ideas I had about working hard now in order to do much less later were not realistic. I didn’t even realize I had this mentality until after a couple of months had gone by and I discovered that there will never be a time when I’m doing ‘nothing’. I’ll always be doing something, so why not just spend some time figuring out what I want to do, not just what I can find a job doing.

The second reason I began looking for jobs in the Indianapolis area was because I realized that it didn’t matter who I was doing the work for, as long as I was enjoying what I was doing. Even as a business owner, I have a boss. I have clients, my wife, and my Lord to report to. It’s not just willy nilly around here. I have to meet or exceed all of their expectations just as I would have to in a traditional job scenario – only more so because while the rewards are higher, so are the risks. There are no written warnings with clients, just lost opportunities in the future.

You Are a Startup

A friend of mine, Jason Cobb, recently coined a term, “You are a startup,” meaning that whatever you’re doing, do it like a startup. But what is a startup? A startup is traditionally a software company that is rapidly trying to create a product that is useful and monetizeable as fast as they can. It normally involves a small team consisting of a leader, a technical co-founder, and a marketer. These roles could all be one person, or it could be five people, but the point is that it’s a small team pushing out useful iterations of a product with the hopes of expanding very fast once a market can’t live without it.

So how does a startup mentality apply to you? Whether you are working for a client or for a company as an employee, you must be producing stuff that matters, you must be a leader, and you must be marketing yourself. This means listening to your customers and getting feedback, getting to know your fellow employees, and continuing your education (via meetups, books, or traditional training).

As I wrote about in 13 More Books for Every Entrepreneur, Reid Hoffman, (co-founder of LinkedIn) together with Ben Casnocha (entrepreneur and author) have written a book about managing your career as if it were a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you. The thesis is that the same skills startup entrepreneurs use, professionals need to get ahead today.

Now that I’ve experienced running my own business, I no longer look down on the traditional 9-to-5 job because I know that I can have impact either way and still accomplish my goals of learning, growing, and taking care of my family.

12 Month Goals (and Roadmap)

I recently subscribed to a blog I’ve been reading since 2008 called I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. Today he sent out a link to a PDF with a 12 Month Goals Roadmap worksheet, very similar to Michael Hyatt’s Life Plan. I’d like to share my answers here.

1. What will you be doing for work? – Editing HTML, CSS, and PHP; Converting static HTML web pages into dynamic CMS blogs; converting clients from POP email access to Google Apps; training users on how to use WordPress; Affiliate Marketing; Computer Network Troubleshooting and Repair

2. What’s your boss (or the person to whom you’ll be accountable) like? – Gives me feedback; Challenges me; Considers me an expert in what I do; Trusts my decisions; Considers my feedback

3. Where will you be working? – The Greater Indianapolis area, preferably along US 31, Keystone Ave, or 465; In an office with time allocated to work in blocks without interruption,  the ability to get up and walk around or go outside for a walk; And good Mexican, Chinese, and Thai food nearby.

4. How much time do you spend working? – 10 hours a day, 70 hours a week.

5. What does your Monday look like? – Reading and sharing emails until noon, viewing reports, and responding to client requests.

If anyone is interested in using my services or would just like to get together for coffee, please don’t hesitate to email me or follow me on Twitter.

This is one of those personal blog posts, if you’re interested in reading more about me specifically, try this one next or not, it’s your life.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012

We would like to thank you for your reading over the past year and look forward to 2012 together. As we look forward to 2012, lets take a look back at 2011.

Here is a list of our top 20 posts from 2011 according to Google Analytics:

• Best of Erich Stauffer Figurines
• Best of Arnart Crossed Arrows
• Arnart Imports Porcelain Marks
• Arnarts’ Erich Stauffer Fake Hummels
• What Happened to Colleclub.com?
• How to Identify Porcelain Figurines
• 80′s Toy Rediscovered, the Original Roller Racer
• 13 More Books for Every Entrepreneur
• Dr. James Dobson’s Twelve Steps of Intimacy
• How to Delete a Digg Submission
• Colleclub.com Email
• Divine Love by Vicente Lladro
• Erich Stauffer Figurines Price Guide
• Willow Tree Mother Daughter Figurine
• 20 Good Business Ideas
• Best Dental Web Sites Reviewing Dentistry Web Design
• What Meetups Mean to Me
• Youtube Query String Parameters
• 20 Serial Entrepreneurs – An Analysis
• Willow Tree Complete 22 Piece Nativity Set by Susan Lordi

Last night at the Agile Indy meeting I learned a little bit about what Agile is. At it’s core it’s a focus on people and teams power to get things done by communicating. Agile facilitates that movement from the individual to the team and from idea to implementation. It’s similar to lean principals when it comes to short, iterative product development cycles.

Retrospectives

We did what they call a “retrospective” which involves these steps:

• Brainstorm
• Cluster
• Prioritize
• Action
• Commit

For the brainstorming session, we were looking for topics the group wanted to discuss or cared about. We used the default star-pattern of, “What do you want to…

• = Stay the same
• > Do more of
• < Do less of
• - Stop doing (it’s hurting us)
• + Start doing

The brainstorming is done with a “one-in-hand” post-it note process where everyone writes one thing, then puts it on a wall or board. The “Cluster” process then uses the team to sort the post-it notes into categories using the same “one-in-hand” method. Seven random people are then asked to assign the clusters into seven different categories. The group then is allowed two dots each to assign importance to the categories. One dot on two categories or two dots on one is allowed. The two most popular categories then go into discussion and from that discussion, 5 action items are created. The last step is to commit these action items to being done and completed.

This is just one part of Agile. There are terms like SCRUM and SPRINT, neither of which I know what they mean (yet). I recently wrote about the Agile meetup as part of the broader category of what meetups mean to me, but I felt there was enough material from last night’s meeting that it deserved it’s own post.

The most popular book on Agile in Amazon doesn’t even mention Agile in the title. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, is a book about achieving breakthrough results by, “methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to discover and develop new ideas.” The author, Peter Sims, researched what went on behind the scenes of some of the great achievements and innovations we witness in today’s world. He said, “Most of them weren’t the epiphanies of geniuses, but instead the result of masters of a specific type of experimentation. To find out the common elements of their experimental approach, I reviewed empirical and neuroscience research about creativity and innovation, and interviewed or observed dozens of people about their approach, including Army counterinsurgency strategists, architect Frank Gehry, agile software development teams, stand-up comedians, entrepreneurs who had self-financed billion dollar businesses, the rapidly growing field of design thinking, and musicians like John Legend, as well as executives inside a range of organizations such as Amazon, Pixar, Procter & Gamble, Google, 3M, General Motors, and Hewlett Packard.” As one reviewer wrote, “Constant experimentation (‘learn by doing’) is fundamental to this approach – and I would add, fundamental to Agile.

In January of 2005 I started my first Meetup called Indy Game Dev. One person joined and together we started to code a game. I didn’t know how to code a game. I had just graduated college with some Computer Science classes where I had to make a few small games in Visual Basic.NET, but I didn’t really know how to make a game.

We started out meeting once a month, and then weekly at his house in Noblesville. He didn’t even have his own computer so we had to use the computer in his mother’s bedroom. I researched gaming engines and different programming languages, but we ended up going with a type of game similar to the NES game, Shadowgate.

We had agendas and a group logo. We created the first screen in the game and started working on the story line, but then that’s when things started to fall apart. In April of 2005, Meetup began charging group owners a fee for hosting a group and the bottom sort of fell out as far as my desire to make games. What I realized is that I didn’t want to make games, I wanted to learn how to make games. Once I did that, my interest level was gone. My partner continued the group and the game for a while after I left, but I didn’t really start going to Meetups again until three years later in 2008.

A Brief History of My Career

I worked full time for the last two years I was in college and then immediately after helped a friend start a computer repair business on the side while continuing to work full time. It was during this time that I started going to Meetups, but I didn’t start going again until I left that job I had through college, started my own business, and got a new job in IT in October of 2007. This is when having a day job and going to meetups felt like I was living a double life. During the day I was a computer technician for an IT company and by night I was a web designer wanting to learn more about Adobe products or PHP.

Through web design and SEO work, I was introduced to the world of affiliate marketing and started making money that way too. Eventually my web design customers started using me more for their technical needs and I began acting as their outsourced IT firm, or simply, their “computer guy.” Eight months after doing IT full time, I became a business analyst at a mid-sized, regional bank. By August of 2011 I was making enough from all of my side ventures to go at it alone so I quit my day job and went full time on my own. That’s when I really started to take advantage of meetups.

Why Go to Meetups?

To Socialize

When I worked for other companies I was around other people all day long. We had meetings. I sometimes got to go places on the company’s dime. Some of these times were good. Most of them were not noteworthy. However, once they were gone, I started to miss that in my life. Sure, I met with clients occasionally, but for the most part I stayed in my office at home. While my family is a joy to me, there is a certain need to go beyond that and meetups can help with that. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m lonely, but there is a certain amount of Edward Norton’s Narrator that goes through my head when I visit a group for the first time.

To Form an Identity

What consistently meeting new people does to you is to help define who you are. This is partly because of the amount of times you have to explain who you are and what you do to new people, but also because simply by going to a particular group, you are associating yourself with that type of person. I’m currently a member of 16 meetups: Affiliate Freelancers Indianapolis, Affiliate Summit Indianapolis Meetup, AgileIndy, Central Indiana Entrepreneur’s & Vendors, Coaches, Consultants, Authors, Speakers & internet marketers, Esri Dev Meet Up Group – Great Plains, Geeks with Swag, Indiana Small Business Networking, Indianapolis Lean Startup Circle, Indianapolis Marketing Group, Indianapolis Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing, Indy Cowork, IndyDevHouse, TechLunch, Verge, and the WordPress – Indianapolis Meetup Group. I recently spoke at the affiliate marketing group, which gives me credibility with the speakers group, even though I already am a consultant.

To Learn

While I have been encouraged to get my masters and have gone back to school for Microsoft, A+, and Network+ certifications, meetups allow a different type of continued education in a wider array of fields. They are also the fields you’re most interested in learning about, or else you probably wouldn’t have signed up or gone to the meeting. Even though I’m profitable with affiliate marketing I still learn things from my affiliate marketing group, but a better example may be the Agile Indy group I attended last night. I had no idea what Agile was, but I kept hearing it and seeing it so I wanted to find out more about it. I wanted to learn. I can’t say I’ve gone to a traditional classroom much with that mentality. If you’re interested in what Agile is, review the Agile Manifesto or visit David Christiansen’s blog, Technology Dark Side. Speaking of affiliate marketing, David makes $2000 a year from advertising Rally Software on his blog. Rally sponsored last night’s meal, which brings me to my next reason.

To Eat

Most meetups either serve food or meet at a restaurant where there is an opportunity to eat food. If you enjoy breaking bread with your fellow man around a topic you love, what better place than at a meetup. The early Christian church would call this their communion time, while the modern church might call it “small groups”. What are meetups, if not small groups of people, passionate about a topic? One exception to “small” may be Verge Indy, which currently has 1,280 members and regularly has to limit members to their events at Developer Town. Most meetups who serve food serve pizza and most of the time it’s free, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch so be prepared for the corporate sponsor to pitch their goods to you. Don’t worry if you’re not interested, maybe one day you will be. Maybe one day you’ll be the sponsor.

To Travel

You probably can’t just walk into Miles Design or Allegient‘s offices, but that’s exactly what I did when I attened Joomla Indy and Agile Indy, respectively. While Joomla Indy isn’t an official meetup, it still meets regularly, in-person, around a topic, which is what meetups are all about. Tonight I’ll be attending the Lean Startup at Green is Good off 86th and Zionsville Road and the Esri meetup at Harry and Izzy’s on Illinois Street, downtown Indianapolis. When I was a business analyst I got to visit the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce’s board room once, now I’m visiting new board rooms every month.

To Network

If you’ve ever been told that you need to get out of comfort zone to grow, meetups are a great way to do that. Most of the people at the meetup I attend, I don’t know before attending. In fact, it’s actually rare for me to know someone there at all. However, once I’ve gone once, I do at least recognize them and can start to get to know them. Networking is a natural result of getting to know other people and meeting new people. Sometimes business cards are passed around and sometimes they are not. Meetups that are specifically setup to network don’t seem to be as popular as ones that are setup around a specific topic. What makes Verge so popular is that it brings together inventors, startups, and venture capitalists with those interested and willing to help. The energy there is intense and the barriers to entry are low. There is no fee for most events, food is provided, and those attending get the chance to pitch and network with others. It’s a great mix.

To Succeed

Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, there is probably a meetup out there to help you do it. Whether it’s meeting like minded people for encouragement or collaboriation, or learning from others who have paved the way before you, meetups can help you become a success. As Eric Willke, agile adviser and speaker at Agile Indy said, “Know you can succeed,” and to that I add – “and you will.”

I spoke a little bit about how to start an Internet marketing business on my blog, An Entrepreneurial Mind, but wanted to go into more detail here about how I got started in Internet marketing and what products I’d recommend. I got started in Internet marketing almost by mistake. I was doing some research about how to promote a particular site and kept running across initials like “IM” and “MS” and “30DC.” After looking into them I realized that there was thing called Internet marketing (IM) and a lot of people used Market Samurai (MS) because of going through the Thirty Day Challenge (30DC). I ended up going through what is now called The Challenge (since their was no fee for awesomeness) and got to really like Ed Dale. I eventually bought Market Samurai and have used that extensively for research. One thing I didn’t learn from any one place though was an overall strategy for how to go from start to finish on a project or a business.

For a long time, I had a card hanging up on my wall that said, “There is a process to success,” which was a quote from Chris Farrell. Chris runs an Internet marketing service that teaches people how to make money online in easy, step-by-step processes from start to finish. What Chris has said, Ed Dale would add, “There’s a process for everything. Creativity is a process. If you’ve ever found yourself sitting in front of the computer wondering what to do next. That’s not a Focus problem…It’s a PROCESS problem.” Learn the processes of successful people and repeat them to be successful yourself. It’s not easy, it’s a process, and one that is learnable. Sir Ken Robinson, an author, speaker, and international advisor on education in the arts to government, non-profits, and education, says that, “Innovation and creativity are learnable skills, not inborn talents.”

I’ve just recently purchased and received Sir Ken’s newest book, The Element, which tackles the challenge of determining and pursuing work that is aligned with individual talents and passions to achieve well-being and success. ‘The element’ is what Sir Ken identifies as the point where the activities individuals enjoy and are naturally good at, come together. I’m looking forward to reading it, but even more looking forward to doing it. I once had a mentor tell me that my mind was always running on a parallel track to what I was working on during the day because I was aligned with my true passion, but that once I did, I would “take off on fire.” That’s partly why I wrote what I did under my new executive coaching blog, Are You on Fire? If you’re not on fire for what you do, what’s stopping you? If you’re tired of that pit in your stomach every time you think about your work, it’s time to consider a change and if you’re looking for help on how to make money online, remember Chris Farrell’s membership program.

There’s an old saying, “You can plant a tree any month with an ‘r’ in it,” which means you’ll have the most success during the months with more naturally occurring rainfall. Of course you can plant trees any month of the year (as long as the ground is not frozen), but from May to August you’re going to have to water the trees to keep them alive. The same thing is true for building up an Internet business because if traffic is rain, then it ‘rains’ the least in months without an ‘r’ in them, which may explain why September traditionally sees the most traffic and is the most productive month. The correlation between traffic and productivity is thought to be because people are getting ‘back to work’ and feeling refreshed after the many events and vacations they took over the summer. Taken a step further, the reason for the down-turn in Internet traffic is probably due to those same events and vacations – and generally people are inside less. Yes, people browse the Internet on their phones, but most Internet (non app) purchases are made from a traditional computer browser.

So what does that mean for Internet marketers?

The first step is to recognise what is happening. You can’t and won’t change human behavior, but you can do two things to help keep your business from experiencing a summer slump:

1. Build during the down time.
2. Build for the down time.

Build during the summer for fall, winter, and spring sales

If most to all of your traffic is organic, you’re going to want to build and backlink before you expect the most sales. It doesn’t make sense to build and launch a new web site or product for Christmas in December. There is just not enough time to become a market leader. However, if you had built for Christmas during the summer, you would be poised for success come December.

Build web sites or products specifically for the summer down times

You may have heard of the Internet marketing term, “evergreen markets”, which means markets that are always in season. Commodities like food and energy are good examples, but evergreen markets are susceptible to downturns in overall traffic, so building a ‘summer niche’ during the winter months is recommended for riding out the summer slump. Some ideas include travel, outdoor sporting equipment, camping gear, or clothing.

Using proven, repeatable techniques there is little risk and great rewards involved in marketing products for profit.

When you use keywords that people are searching for, you naturally drive traffic to your site, which in turn makes you money online. But how do you find the right keywords and how do you know what people are searching for?

There are six key steps to this process which will answer all of these questions:

1. Find Micro-Niche Keywords – Identify a micro-niche inside a penetrable market that has profitable products that people are already selling. A micro-niche is a subset of a market niche.
2. Verify Keyword Volume – Using WordTracker and/or the Google External Keyword Tool, make sure searches are over 80 per day and that there are under 30,000 search results overall.
3. Verify Keyword Competition – Determine whether or not you will be able to penetrate the top 10 results in Google based on the number of top-level domains listed, their age, and number of backlinks.
4. Produce Keyword-Rich Content – Write content for your primary landing page that also contains your primary keywords and links to sub-pages that contain longer keyword phrases.
5. Promote Using Keywords – Write articles, blog posts, and lenses for posting on other web sites that link back to your sub-pages with your longer keyword phrases. Post at least two Youtube videos.
6. Sell Products or the Web Site Itself – At this point, if you followed all of the steps, you should be making money online by selling products.  If not, then consider selling the domain for a profit online at Flippa or Sedo.

The rate of success with this method is roughly 1 out of 8 and marketing and testing can take anywhere from 1 to 30 days.  Success is defined as more money coming in than is going out each month and that includes all opportunity costs (time that could have been spent making money in other activities).  Tracking is critical not only with the data of the results, but with the finances and time spent.

Profit can be made from almost any niche – the key is knowing how to find it

This is a simplified method for how to find a niche. Essentially we begin with the end in mind, knowing we’re going to need a product to sell that is currently being sold, but maybe not as well as it could be.  Maybe it’s hard to find or maybe the people who are selling it want help selling it.  That’s where you come in.  Here is an example:

I like computer games so I use Google to search for “computer games” (without quotes, which is called a ‘broad search’), which gives me back 200 results. I then use the criteria (as mentioned in 6 Steps to Making Money Online and Research and Analysis Metrics) to narrow them down to one ‘keyword’ I’d like to use.  I then find 200 more keywords related to that one keyword and again narrow those down to 4.

Now I have my micro-niche, which is identified by the keyword, “World of Warcraft Gold”.  I then have to see how much competition there is for that keyword and if it is a penetrable market (one that has low domain age, a small amount of back-links, and no or low directory listings). Only then can I move on to check whether or not there is something to sell.  If there is something to sell, then we ask ourselves if we would want to work for the amount of money it is offering.  If it is, then we build and start promoting.  If I don’t get traffic, I kill it and start over or sell the domain on Flippa or Sedo.

How to Find a Niche

Sometimes coming up with ideas for a niche is hard.  One set of advice I heard was to look in the back of magazines to see what people are selling because it means there is already a niche market for it because people are buying it.  You can also use Google Trends or Twitter Search to see what is trending right now.

Here are some examples from ads in the back of a magazine:

• Logo Design
• Web Design
• Business Plans
• Botta Solus Watches
• Timeshares
• Oranges as Holiday Gifts
• Exercise Equipment
• Employee Leasing
• Business Services

Here is what is currently trending on Google Trends:

• tom delay
• ashley turton
• eftps
• bcs championship game
• liberal smear machine
• todd graham
• houston livestock show and rodeo 2011
• eftps.gov
• ron rivera
• www.eftps.gov

Here is what is currently trending on Twitter Search:

• Wojtek Wolski
• Lionel Andres Messi
• María Elena Walsh
• Beth Gouveia
• Fernanda Vasconcelos
• Sue Sylvester
• Great Gatsby
• Toni Ramos
• CHAD CHAD
• #palabrasquedanmiedo

Research and Analysis Metrics

Micro-niches are identified as the number one keyword receiving at least 80 searches per day and websites containing that keyword being less than 30,000 globally. The key is to find that sweet spot on the matrix of high traffic and low competition. To do this, find keywords which match the following criteria:

At least three keywords other keywords within the micro-niche with similar criteria must also be identified, if not, start over.  Top ten competition for the top four keywords has to be penetrable within the time allowed (usually no more than 30 days). Once you find five total keyword phrases you can begin to create a website, market, and begin testing.

Metrics to consider are:

• Domain age
• # of back-links to domain
• # of back-links to page mentioning the keyword
• # of back-links from .gov or .edu domains
• Exists in Yahoo! Directory?
• Exists in BOTW (Best of the Web) Directory?
• Exists in DMOZ (ODP) Directory?

Need more web directories?

If the competition has a young domain age, a low number of back-links, and does not exist in any of these directories, then the market is penetrable.  If the opposite is true, stop and start over.

Check to see that related products are both available to be sold and are being sold by others.  If either is not true, stop and start over.

If both of those tests pass, then make sure the products are giving a referral amount that you deem acceptable.  If not, stop and start over. Otherwise, you now have products in a penetrable micro-niche that are profitable to sell.

Marketing and Testing

Begin by setting up a place to place your products.  This is where your marketing efforts will point back to.  It can be a Squidoo page, Blogger, or WordPress.com or WordPress running on your own domain.

If you are using Blogspot or WordPress, install Google Analytics to track traffic.  If using Squidoo or Hubpages, there are tracking mechanisms built into the site. You can’t manage what you are aren’t measuring so track everything you can.

Use the following chart to give you an idea of how to setup your web site for maximum keyword use and Google dominance.

Once you have content on your primary landing pages and sub-pages, begin to create back-links to your site by placing links to the domain, the blog posts, and the the product pages on social bookmarking, social media, and in blog comments in your related market.  Be sure to add links from .edu and .gov domains. You can search Google specifically for blogs on those domains manually by using the following syntax:

site:.edu “post a comment” –“comments are closed” “[enter your keyword here]”

Track the incoming page hits.  Testing for viability can begin only after your product’s page is receiving at least 200 hits per day.  If you are not getting 200 hits per day, then try these things first:

• Increase the number of blog posts on and off the site using other services like hubpages and squidoo – then promote all of the new posts again
• Make sure you are promoting on at least 30 different sites for each post – you can use services like ping.fm or trafficbug to assist with this task
• Pay to have your site listed in the Yahoo! Directory
• Pay for Google Adwords or Bing (Microsoft) AdCenter
• Add pictures with descriptive text to get hits from search engine’s image searches
• Add video to Youtube with links and comment on other videos in your micro-niche
• Make sure you are posting to Twitter and Facebook regularly and engaging in conversation, not just promoting

If after 30 days or at your own set threshold, you are still not receiving 200 hits or more per day, your product is not viable.  Consider selling your website on Flippa or Sedo.  You have just found one of your 1 in 8 failures.

If you do have over 200 hits per day, but are not getting conversions, first try changing out your ad copy, images of the products, and/or placement of the two on the page.  If after changing all three of these variables and still your conversion rate (revenue) is below your expenses, then sell your domain and start over.  If not, you have a profitable online business.

These are the Windows tools I use to make web sites, which in turn makes me money online.

Notepad++ – If you’ve used Windows anytime in the last 25 years you know about Notepad, but don’t let the name fool you, Notepad++ is a notable improvement over Notepad, specifically for programmers. Now you might not think of yourself as a programmer, but if you’re editing HTML, CSS, or PHP you’ll find Notepad++’s code-identifying text color changes useful as well as the ability to have multiple tabs open at once (with split screen ability), and “just how you want it to act” tab spacing. It auto-indents code and can indent rows of code at once in highlighted sections. Another neat feature is the ability to search within files or folders for text, which I have used many times.

Filezilla – The defacto standard for open-source FTP programs, Filezilla is what I use to upload files to my host. It’s not as secure as SSH secure shell, but it gets the job done for free. Filezilla’s site manager tool can save connection information, making it easy for you to manage different FTP accounts, but I tend to just use the quickconnect bar, which saves a history of your recently visited FTP sites. Individual view windows can be turned on or off in the view file menu and more customization is available in the settings menu.

Firebug – A browser plug-in for developers that works best in Firebug, but has versions for Chrome and Internet Explorer too that don’t work as well. This program lets you highlight items inside the browsers view screen to find out information or to make temporary changes. These temporary changes allow you to preview the affects before you make the changes permanent. This is an excellent tool and a must-have for web site developers.

Chrome – Contained within Chrome’s tools is a feature called “Chrome developer tools,” which works much like Firebug, but is built into Chrome. It allows you to browse elements on the page or make temporary changes. One nice feature is the Audit tab which lets you review things like network utilization and web page performance. A quick run of the audit tool will yield you advice (if you need it) on CSS, Javascript, cookies, and cache usage.

Paint.Net – For advanced photo editing with layers, Paint.Net delivers as the strongest free comparison to Adobe Photoshop. It features several advanced adjustment tools including “Black and White,” “Curves,” and “Sepia.” There are also built-in effect tools ranging from artistic, to blurs, to distortion, which rival those of Photoshop. For a comparison with Paint.Net, try GIMP. Paint.Net, GIMP, and Photoshop all are made to edit raster graphics, which are like photographs and cannot scale up without losing resolution. Vector images, on the other hand, are like those used in animation and logos and use math to create lines. This allows them to scale up and down without losing resolution since its just a recalculation of the math. Vector images can only be edited with special programs like Inkscape, which is free, or Adobe Illustrator.

Picasa – While its biggest feature is probably its photo management and gallery functions, the reason I’ve included it in this list is as a subsidy to Paint.Net and even Photoshop for specific picture editing. There are two views, “Library” and “Edit”. Inside the edit view there are three tabs, “Basic Tuning”, “Fixes,” and “Effects”. In Basic Tuning or Fixes I use the fill light command the most as I feel it does a better job than just adding brightness using Paint.Net or Photoshop. In Effects I use “Glow”, “Soft Focus”, and “Sepia” the most. Paint.Net also has a sepia effect. Use these or the “Collage” tool in the Library view to create neat pictures for your web site.

Inkscape – A free alternative to Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape is a fully baked open-source scalable vector image editing program. It takes some getting used to if you’re used to working with raster images in layers, but once you get the hang of manipulating objects and lines and knowing when to left-click and when to right-click, you’ll be able to make some decent iconography that might save you some money over buying stock images for your web sites. And just because it is open-sourced doesn’t mean it’s not supported. There is lots of documentation, tutorials, and online forums in a community willing to share and collaborate. If you already own Adobe Illustrator this is a fine tool and also comes highly recommended.

If I’ve missed a Windows tool that you use, please mention it in the comments and for Apple and Linux users, feel free to add your comments as well to share with all.

As we head into the new year I have been thinking a lot about goals lately.  I was reminded of an old function I created once for the achievement of a goal.  If you are wanting to make money online, you are wanting to start a business (whether you think of it as a business or not).

Think of the act of creating a business as a pre-defined function:

goal + team + defined product + defined market + advertising = achievement of goal

So, the goal is the beginning of the function and the achievement of that goal is the result. Without a goal, there is no function. The function is the business. Therefore, without a goal, there is no business.

How to Define a Goal

Dave Ramsey, a financial author and motivational speaker has five rules for goals:

1. They must be specific
2. They must be written down
3. They must be measurable
4. They must be time-sensitive
5. They must be yours

The first three are self-explanatory, but “time-sensitive” means setting an end-date. Diana Scharf Hunt, a motivational writer, is famous for saying, “Goals are dreams with deadlines,” but what does Dave mean by “yours”. I think it means that it has to be something you care about, something you are passionate about. Passion is key to the goal, which also means it is key to your business, according to the function.

What are you passionate about? It’s okay to be passionate about making money. That is an okay reason to start a business. Even not-for-profits need to make money to survive. Those who are successful in business realize that they are not making money for money’s sake. They are tithing, providing other people with jobs, helping their local communities, providing for their family, all the things that come from making money.

Lets say our goal is to make money and we want to go down the list, applying the rules:

1. Be specific. How much money do we want to make? Money without time constraints is irrelevant so lets use the unit of a year. Lets say we want to make an additional $40,000 a year – on top of what we make now.

2. Write it down. I’ve wrote it down in this post, but you should write it down on a piece of paper, in an email, or in an online collaborative space like Google Docs or Google Sites.

3. Must be measurable. Track how much we make using Quickbooks Online or online through Google Docs spreadsheets. Income – Expenses = Profit or Assets – Liabilities = Owners Equity.

4. Must be time-sensitive. Lets say the goal is to make an additional $40,000 by May 30.

5. Must be yours. I came up with it, but you must make it your own.

How to Build a Team

This one is harder, but nothing easy is worthwhile so lets get at it. Any and all team members must buy into the goal. If they don’t then they shouldn’t be a team member. Because the function doesn’t work without the goal, we have to have team members focused on the goal. When the focus is on the goal, the team can work on the next part of the function, which is defining a product. Notice how the product was not thought of before the team was created. This is important and on purpose. Jim Collins in his book, “Good to Great,” tells the story of Hewlett and Packard, having their first meeting, “Agenda: Decide what products we are going to sell.” They had the right people with the same goal, to make a successful business. They ironed out the who before ever worrying about the what and how.

How to Define a Product

This one is harder still, but now you have a team to help. First, state the problem you are trying to solve. This is critical. What is wrong that you are trying to fix? What can you do better than anyone else? How can you differentiate your product or service from another company’s? Before you look under any rocks and start wasting your time Googling the universe for problems, look within yourself. What frustrates you? What needs changed? What have you complained about in the last week? What, if anything would you like help with? What would you like to know more about? I for one would like to know what people are searching for when they want to find things. That way, I’ll know what keywords to use in order to attract those searchers to my websites. It’s simple, understandable, and a definite problem for not just me, but every person who has a website. So for now, lets go with that. Our product (for this conversation) will be in offering information on what people are searching for in order to find their products. This seems like a product that might be able to help us achieve our goal and will give your business a reason for being.

How to Define a Market

A market is more than a geographical area or demographic of people, its also a category of product or service. Regardless, its the marketplace in which you think you’ll have the best opportunity to make a sale, which helps you with your primary goal, the goal without which your business would fail to function. Focus on the outcome, the goal. Realize how many sales at your products range of prices you’d have to make in order to reach your goal. For micro-niche and blog sites, use Google’s External Keyword Tool to see how much traffic a given set of keywords within a market is getting.  Use search volumes as well as existing competition (if someone is selling it, someone is making money on it) to determine whether or not the market is viable.  If you have a brick and mortar business, try a Craigslist or eBay auction of the product or service first as a prototype to test.

How to Advertise

Define what makes you different and/or better than your competition and hammer it home. Focus on your market and be an expert on your product. Don’t spend any money on advertising until you have exhausted all the free ways you can promote yourself online and through social interaction. If you feel you have exhausted all of your free advertising and you still have no sales, go back to “How to Define a Product” and think of a new product. This new product may then need to define a new market and then advertise again. Repeat until you reach your goal. As Winston Churchill said, Never give up. Never. Never. Never. Never.”

If you liked this article, you might also like reading The Confidence-Success Loop.