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Ten Business Boosting Quick Tips for Site Owners
Posted by Scott on 8th October, 2007 | 17 commentsThis is a simple but important list that you can implement quickly. Some of these are reminders, but we all get so busy that we sometimes overlook the fundamentals:
- Create DNS CNAME entries for w.yourname.com and ww.yourname.com typo traffic.
- I can hear you saying “Oh, DUH! why didn’t I think of that!”. I’m not promising you a 50% increase in traffic here, but every visitor counts. Notice that these work: http://ww.google.com, http://w.google.com, but http://w.yahoo.com is basically a 404. Get with the program, Yahoo!
- Never be afraid to ask for more money or a bigger revenue share from a partner, all they can do is say no.
- Typically, I’ll join a network and accept their default revshare at first, then after a few months I will call or write and say “you know, we’ve been sending a lot of sales/traffic/leads your way but your revshare is lower than our other deals, what can you do about that?”.. and it works. The exception here would be if you’re dealing with a Gorilla like Google - you’d better be a gorilla yourself to get any kind of special deal in that case, but most companies will play ball.
- Register misspellings of your domain.
- You can either spend $8/ea at godaddy or enom to register misspellings now, or $2,000 each to recover the name in an ICANN arbitration later. Don’t go nuts hunting for juxtaposed keyboard typos, just register the obvious ones (plurals, .net, drop off a double letter (letter.com -> leter.com), that is if a domainer hasn’t beaten you to it.
- Setup Google analytics.
- Yes I know, duh, but some people haven’t done this. It’s free, and the stats will be absolutely invaluable to you if someone ever wants to buy your site.
- Keep a changes log
- Also known as, “Damn, why did my site’s revenue drop 20% on April 18th, I can’t remember what I did?!” Sound familiar? Keep a changes log of every major change that you make to your site and note the day/hour of each change. Just keep it in a notepad file if you want. If you discover a problem later, look back at the date where the problem first occurred and bam, you’ll likely find the change that did it.
- Make sure you have Adsense on every page
- If you forgot to put Adsense on a section of your site, you’re losing $. Go through and check.
- Implement Kontera or IntelliTXT (if even for guests only, for forums)
- This is a great way to squeeze a bit more money out of your site and as mentioned, these companies will do CPM guarantee deals.
- Check with your web host to see if they offer an automated daily backup solution like Discsync (which The Planet offers).
- This is usually pretty easy to setup and offers peace of mind in case of a hardware failure. A failure doesn’t need to end your business or ruin your life, it can actually be no big deal if you take a couple hours to make sure that a server backup system is setup and working.
- Take an afternoon to organize and prioritize your to do list.
- You know, all of those lists, scraps of paper, and notepad windows you have scattered around. Somewhere in that mess is a fantastic but forgotten idea just waiting to be rediscovered. Be honest with yourself about what tasks you believe could have the most positive impact on your business and put those at the top of your list. I often divide my list into A, B, and C projects, and I create a separate list for really quick todo items that take a short amount of time and aren’t really projects (and I prioritize that quick todo list separately). Don’t get me wrong, I’m a disorganized mess, but when I take the time to do this I almost always end up getting great stuff accomplished because having a bunch of tasks scattered everywhere often paralyzes me because I don’t know what I should be working on.
- Check your homepage title, meta description and keywords tags as well as title tags throughout your site.
- I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve visited where the title is something like “Mydomain.com”. You’re missing out on valuable organic SEO benefit if your title isn’t descriptive. And for the advanced webmasters out there, it’s easy to forget to include a meta description or keywords tag and many search engines still use these.
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Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 1:35 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Nice and very informative information.
thanxs for sharing.
Good advice. What I have done in the past on point 1 is just have *.domain.com set up in DNS and then .htaccess to redirect anything.site.com to www.site.com.
This is a good reminder because I moved servers and completly forgot about that
#1 is something that I haven’t thought about before…interesting.
#5 is a good suggestion. It’s amazing how many times I’ve learned that the hard way.
#7 Everywhere I read I find that people hate Kontera ads…do you think that you can lose visitors because of these?
#10 is very important. While some think SEO best practices is like snake oil, I believe this is very important. Several of my friends have made 6 figure incomes just off of ranking high for 1 or 2 keywords.
[…] shares tips for site owners, explains how to make money with forums and offers advice on getting started with your own seven […]
why do you put “dot com” in the title as opposed to “W Revenue”?
what does this achieve from an SEO standpoint?
Thanks for sharing this info. Just joined your blog from johnchow.com and I am liking it already
Point#1. I am not a coder so forgive me. Just how would i go about doing this and do I have to have my own server?
I really appreciate your frank sharing of information here. refreshing.
“Point#1. I am not a coder so forgive me. Just how would i go about doing this and do I have to have my own server?”
The best way to learn to code is to start out by modifying other people’s scripts while using books or online docs as a reference. Over time you’ll be able to start writing your own stuff.
A prime example of why it’s important to know how to code: there are tons of API’s out there offered by Amazon, Shopping.com, Google, you name it. Being able to pull in XML from an API, stick it in a MySQL database and do stuff with the data, is a great skill to have.
If you run any kind of application based site that isn’t out of the box, or you have an idea for a site, you can always hire developers to create the backend for you if you have the funds, but knowing how to code lets you add features and improve the site going forward without paying a developer for every little thing. Just being able to quickly make a change yourself is invaluable.
I don’t know if this site is any good but here’s a learning PHP resource:
http://www.phpbuddy.com/index.php
I do more coding in Perl than I do in PHP because it works great in the backend (to interface with API’s etc), whereas PHP is great for generating dynamic pages that are shown to users.
This site lists tons of available API’s (http://techmagazine.ws/full-web-20-api-list/). There is endless opportunity out there to come up with a site that mashes together data in a unique way. Think zillow.com mashing in property tax values with map data and aerial photos for instance.
very informative website…thanks
Thanks Scott, I’ll look into it.
Great tips, Scott. Now I just need to find - take the time to get my own site redesigned and updated.
Great tips all. You made the bookmark list. Although I think I mis-understood the cname clue and just pestered my ISP tech support for something I am never going to get.
Oh well, the techies at Bluehost are pretty decent folks … in a couple of hours I’ll get an email naming me “Moron of the Week” and offering the clue I was previously lacking.
I WILL point out that a Google search for “http://w.nmwoodowrks.com” actually resulted in a referral to my site … so there is hope even for a “Moron of the Week”
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“10. Check your homepage title, meta description and keywords tags as well as title tags throughout your site.”
Hi,
Keywords plays an important part for blog success especially to search engines. When I checked the source code of my blog I found out that there are no keywords in my meta name and only the name of my blog was there
() .
Can I still add keywords to my blog on this code?? I am using wordpress. Thanks for the tips!!!
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The tips are awesome. I particularly like no. 2. It is simple but most of us just ignore this one.