NOT a Guru!
Keeping it simple, without the hype. PC tips and Internet advice for mom and pop businesses.
Keeping it simple, without the hype. PC tips and Internet advice for mom and pop businesses.
In this tutorial, we’re continuing to build a site from scratch for a friend of mine who has never, ever had a website before.
I’ve been stressing the importance of knowing your site mission and having an outline of what you want to include in your site. This applies to mom and pop storefronts, to affiliate sites, to information sites, to membership sites. If you have a road map, so to speak, you will have a general idea of what kind of keywords and phrases you want to integrate into your site content.
Our example site that we’re building from scratch is CalmingFood.com, which concerns compulsive eating, obesity and weight loss issues. As I mentioned before, we have a “regular” front end that is static, but the most active part of the site will be a blog that Laura, my friend and site owner, can update on her own without having to have web authoring knowledge. Today, we’re going to take a look at the research and content writing that went into the static portion of her site.
Use Google and Find Some Good Keywords!
Even if you are building an online store for your brick and mortar business, keyword research is essential. What you think people are searching for may not necessarily be the words that they are using in real life.
A common pitfall with beginners is that they spend way too much time on graphics, adding sounds, and putting “cool” javascripts on their pages in order to impress their friends. (See our poll, What Makes a Website Stink? )
The reality is that when people use a search engine, they type in words.
You need to know what those words are if you want to get visitors from the search engines.
Google offers a wealth of free resources that will help you figure out what keywords to use. I have several posts about these great Google tools here.
For Laura’s front page, I used Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool to see what the search volume was for a couple of phrases that her site is about; i.e., comfort food and emotional eating. I used some of the terms that had a search volume of over 200 searches per month. I didn’t pay much attention to the advertiser competition because we’re not putting Adsense on these static pages; instead, these static pages are monetized with Clickbank products. I’m looking for organic traffic to these pages with the hope that we’ll attract some interested buyers. I have not shown the full search results in the screen shot below.
I also took a look at another search term, food cravings. You can see that there are some pretty hefty annual and monthly searches for the keywords that appeared in Google. I went with “stop food craving,” which has a volume of 210 annual and monthly searches so far during 2009 (we’re still in January, so this number will obviously change). Additionally, at least 140 searches were conducted this month at Google for “how to stop food craving.”
HUGE UPDATE!
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A way to capitalize on the keywords is to include them in the header text of your web pages. This is easy to do with XSitePro – you just highlight the text and select what heading level you want. Alternatively, you would include the code, <h1>Your Text</h1>, <h2>Next Header</h2> and so on. With XSitePro, you can then add your keywords in the Page Settings portion of the software. The Page Analysis part of the software will tell you which keywords have been properly optimized for the search engines.
Throughout your website design and content writing process, it behooves you to do some keyword research. If you’re selling candles, research what “candle terms” people are actually looking for. It might add a few minutes of work to each page right now, but it will pay off for you in the long run. Be sure you emphasize those keywords by either turning them into hyperlinks, naming your pages by keyword (i.e., http://www.yoursite.com/food-craving.html), and emphasizing those words in headings, by bolding or underscoring them, and referencing them in your image descriptions.
Monetizing the Static Web Pages.
There are a lot of great affiliate programs out there that you can join. On Laura’s site, as with our other example site for Antiquing with Deco Diva, we’ve decided to feature Clickbank products in the static portions of the sites in order to monetize them. We will be using many other affiliate programs in the blog portion of the site.
You need to sign up as an affiliate at Clickbank in order to receive a commission on your sales. To find products to sell, click the link that reads “Clickbank Marketplace.” Enter a general search term as shown below. You might need to play around with your search terms to find a product that is relevant to your site.
In Laura’s case, stopping food cravings is definitely on target, so we selected this product as one of her flagship products on the static portion of her site. We selected another product that has a super high conversion level, and included the audio affiliate link in the main panel header that appears throughout the site (see yesterday’s discussion about the “panels” in XSitePro’s website design software).
Understanding Clickbank’s Marketplace Results.
Here is a snapshot of the Clickbank marketplace description of the stop food cravings product that Laura is featuring on her home page:
You’ll see that there is some information in green that may not make a bunch of sense to you right off the bat. Here’s a quick explanation without taking into account some of the complicated formulas behind the numbers:
- $/sale refers to the average amount of money each affiliate earns per sale. This fluctuates, depending on possible returns, on transaction fees, etc.
- Future $ would refer to recurring memberships. This is a one-time-buy product, so the future commissions does not apply and is blank.
- %/sale refers to your commission amount; in this case, 50%.
- %refd shows the approximate percentage of sales that are through affiliates. In the above example, 44% of the product is sold by affiliates, meaning that the vendor is directly selling 56%.
- grav is based on various Clickbank formulas and indicates the number of affiliates who had sales over the last 8 weeks. If this number is high, that means that there are a lot of affiliates who are making money with the product. If low, it indicates that there is very little competition with other affiliates.
In Laura’s case, we know that there are over 200 (maybe over 300) searches a month on how to stop food cravings, and very low competition in our flagship product. This could mean that the product does not sell well; on the other hand, it could represent a great opportunity.
If you click the “view pitch page” link, you’ll see the product sales page and get a feel for whether or not you want to sell the product. To create your affiliate link, you click the “create hoplink” page, add in your Clickbank affiliate ID, and copy and paste the URL. (NOTE: There are ways to mask the URL, which are not discussed here.)
Some of the Clickbank vendors have fabulous affiliate tools (like the one that appears on the top of each of Laura’s pages). Most of them, however, do not.
For Laura’s stop food cravings product, we’ve downloaded the picture of the ebook for sale. To do this, just right click on the image that you want to save, click ’save as,” and store it where you can find it.
Write your text, create hyperlinks using your affiliate code from the “create hoplink” in both your text and images, and you’ve just monetized your site.
If you don’t understand hyperlinks, take advantage of the free newbie giveaway that lasts until January 31. This giveaway has a “cheat sheet” for simple html code. Read more about it here. I think this giveaway event is absolutely essential for beginners.
Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the additional content in Laura’s static portion of her site, plus a review of privacy policies.
~~~ Quick Navigation ~~~
Yesterday: How to Design Your Site Template, Using XSitePro.
Tomorrow: How to Write Web Content, Part 2 – Policies and Research; Creating YouTube Videos for Free.
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