I have met two people lately who would be a good piece to the Directory One team. Donatus Weobong, and Steve Lawrence. One’s in Louisville and one’s in Houston. I think Donatus has some customers and Steve is pationate about SEO. Both have above average people skills and marketing skills. They could help Directory One get to the next level. I would like to see their contribution for one year then cut them in on the business we have here. Skills and work ethic are the key to more partners. Both would bring in more customers, probably more than enough to pay for themselves. I will work on a deal with them soon. We don’t need anymore 40 hour type of people. Allow them burnout time to time but expect your partners to get back up on their horse soon after a burnout. Expect great communication within your team. I love helping people grow their income. A search engine marketing customer or a member of my team. I hope we can be fair and equitable to all. This is a great business and one I will be involved in the rest of my life. I have worked 25 years running my own company and finally I am enjoying what I am doing.

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There’s a lot of hype about hits these days, but let’s face it: A successful website isn’t just about how many visitors, or hits, you can attract. It’s about sales. If you get 10,000 visitors a month, but only 1 sale, what good were the other 9,999? On the other hand, if you get only 1,000 visitors a month, but 20 of them buy..well, you get the point. A successful website is about conversions and for that you need qualified leads.

A successful internet marketing plan will focus on directing qualified leads to your website that will convert to sales and increase your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors that purchase your product or service. Taking the above examples, if you had 10,000 visitors, but only 1 sale, your conversion rate would be 1/10,000, or .01%. That’s pretty lousy. If you had 1,000 visitors a month, and 20 sales, your conversion rate would be 20/1,000, or 2%. That’s much more respectable.

What’s a good conversion rate? Depending on your industry, a good conversion rate will typically range from 2% to 5%.

How do you increase conversion rate? There are two parts to any sale, or conversion.

 1. Attract qualified leads. If you’re attracting people who are already interested in your product or service, then half the work of the sale is done before your visitor’s arrival.

 2. Complete the sale. The second part of the sale happens on your website. Do you have the right graphics, verbiage and usability functions to convince your visitor to complete the sale?

Tip #1. Target the right search phrases. What will people be typing into search engines to find your product or service? You want to come up on the first page in search engine results, but for what search phrases? It’s almost always a bad decision to focus all of your efforts on the broadest search terms—you want targeted search terms for targeted leads.

For example, just because you sell Dalmatians, doesn’t mean you should focus all of your efforts on coming up on the first page of search engine results for the term “dogs”. Think about all the things people could be looking for when they type in such a broad search term: information for a school paper, a dog lovers blog, images of dogs for a business brochure. But what about if you came up for the search term “Dalmatian puppies in Houston”? Wouldn’t that bring you more targeted leads—leads that are halfway ready to be converted to sales?

Tip #2. Pay attention to your descriptions and titles. You can think of the description and title that show up in search engine results as a little mini-ad. It needs to accurately describe what the visitor will get when he or she clicks through to your website, or your potential sale could get discouraged and turn away.

So remember, next time you’re looking at your website hit counter: There’s another number you should be paying attention to. How many sales did you bring in this month, and what does that say about your websites ability to turn hits into cash?

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I meet people everyday who are great at search engine optimization.  Most people I meet seem to have the on page optimization down. This is one of the most important parts of search engine marketing development. aquiring back links, and developing current content are the other two major things people must do if they want to rank well on the search engines. I met a interesting fellow this weekend at my office. He is general manager and webmaster of a company that sells phone systems in the Houston area. His site ranks quite well. He had great people skills and he loved doing the css files that web designers use these days. He is worth what they are paying him at his company. 65K a year plus bonus based on the profit of the company. He seemed driven. I liked him a lot and hope to get more involved with him. I can’t wait to gross enough money to give a guy like him a chance as he could make himself and or us a great deal of money. Even with his limited experience I would call him one of the few experts I have exposed myself to. He was married with a couple little ones so I think he will take the next ten years serious. I would like to give him a year to work with us. I could us some people like him to help me build my company. I have two great leaders in Sean Odom CTO  and John Holchin CEO and President who will need some help soon. This guy would fit into this executive team well.

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We recently opened an office in Louisville, Kentucky and met with several of the players in the web design, SEO field, Via Studio’s and with Mission Data. I met with Dot trend, Jason Brown, and Rob Docherty. But the most impressive appointment I had was with a guy named Donatus from telania.com. His ranks #1 under “sucessful search engine marketing” and his site is down right now. He had great people skills and he is driven to grow his company. He outsources to Romania. He has a great learning system at eleap.com. We can help each other grow our companies as he seems to be driven. He let me no he went to Bellarmine University in Louisville. We could be more together than we are seperate.  Lize Reed is working a great deal or time to make all of this happen in the Louisville effort.  I can tell by her work habits that we are from the same family. Shaun Tinnell will be starting full time this Monday in the Louisville office. I hope this helps us grow our sales. Our Louisville office has their own website at www.seolouisville.com

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Follow the simple code example below in order to implement a page specific 301 redirect. This is also a handy redirect for informing a search engine spiders that a web page has permanently moved.

Warning, you will be editing your .htaccess file, so please be careful and make a backup of the original just in case there is a problem.

First, download the .htaccess file via FTP. Next open the .htaccess file with a plain text editor such as notepad. If there’s already code in the file be sure you skip a line before adding the code below. Now copy and paste the following code into the .htaccess file;

(without the “<-- -->” part)

RedirectPermanent /old.html http://www.yoursite.com/new.html

Next, replace the “old_page” portion with your unique “page name”, save and upload.

Now when somebody requests old.html they will be automatically redirected to http://www.yoursite.com/new.html.

Note, be sure to include a space between the old page and new location portion, see below;
/old_page.html space http://www.yoursite.com/new_page.html

For more information about 301 redirects, please see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html#redirectpermanent

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Follow the simple example below to have .yoursite.com redirect to www.yoursite.com.

Word of warning, you will have to edit your .htaccess file to accomplish this. Please be careful and always make a backup of the original just in case there is a problem.

First, open your .htaccess file with a plain text editor such as notepad. Next copy and paste the following code into the .htaccess file;

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Next, simply replace “yoursite” with your unique URL, save and upload. Now when somebody types in yoursite.com they will be automatically redirected to www.yoursite.com.

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