What are your web designers thinking?

Though I am do own a website design company, I am primarily an internet marketing coach and an SEO. I started this company for one reason and one reason only. I hate running into the disaster of trying to optimize a website built by someone who doesn’t know what SEO is. This is much more common than you may think.

I see it every day. Someone gets their site built and then comes to me to help get it to the top of the search results. I then find that the site was built with only beauty in mind, and no sign of relevant keywords, anchor text and in some cases, not even meta tags. The site may be beautiful, but to google it is a mess. No real structure for the spider to crawl, and sign of relevancy from one page to the next.

These are the things that can not be left out if you want to be competitive in an online market. You need structure. You need to be able to write articles, or pay someone to do so, that link to specific area’s of your website. This is what google wants to see. And beyond google, if your site is easy to navigate, people will not hang around to figure it out. They will move on to a website that they can flow through to find the information they want.

When you are looking for a web designer, do your research, and find out if they know more than beautification. It is a nightmare for an SEO to fix these sites and move them up in the rankings.

Chris Owen

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What is the #1 reason for having a custom website?

Of course it all depends on what you are doing. If it is a business that sells, or requires members to join you have a lot more to think about than just getting traffic.

I did a little research on a top “work from home opportunity” that offers a website landing page to send your prospects to. The conversion rate of that particular capture page was about 4%. That means that if 100 people click a link to the site, about 4 will join your business.

So how are you getting your traffic? If you are like most successful online marketers, you are using PPC or pay per click advertising. So let’s say you pay an average of $1 per click on your ad. That means you paid $25 each per new member. This particular company has you at about $3 profit per month on those 4 members that you paid $100 to get.

That sounds bad I know, but with 500 members you are in profit over $2000 a month. The problem is, that with PPC at their conversions you have over $12,000 invested in advertising. Marketers with deep pockets can handle this and within 6 months will be in considerable profit. But what if you found a way to improve those conversions.

People like to know something about who they are joining up with. Having a custom website is your way to do just that. You don’t have to be a salesman on your personal site. All you really have to do is be you. Offer something that the company site can’t. No one else can be you, so you have that market cornered. If your site is well designed and lets the prospects feel good about who you are, then you can improve you conversions exponentially.

So now you have your new site up. It lets your prospects get to know a little about you and why you, personally chose this business. They can relate to you, and feel like they are getting to know you. Now they are more willing to be a part of your team.

What if you just raised your conversions to 8% instead of 4%. Now you built your team of 500 members strong with a little over $6,000.

With an investment of between $500 and $1,000 you saved $6,000 in pay per click advertising to get the same amount of team members. How’s that for an investment.

It gives you something to think about when you choose where to invest your expenses with your business. Do you want to spend a lot on ads with a 4% conversion rate, or spend your dollars on something you buy once and keep earning money off of for years to come. Not to mention that your personal site can be marketed your way, and SEO’d for success, when the companies landing page has almost 0 chance of ever reaching the top end of the organic search results, where the free clicks happen.

Be wise with your investments and plan for the future, not the right now. Every top earner in online marketing I have ever heard of has their own personal site, and so should you if you want to join them.

Chris Owen

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The big question. Why do so many people fail with work from home businesses?

I could continue this post into a book that would eventually have to be hauled with a truck. Many people fail with online and offline businesses fail for several reasons. To list a few would be:

1) Education

2) Support

3) Marketing

4) Branding

5) Internet Presence

The problem is, that better than 85% of people, when starting their work from home businesses, think that they are going to be able to use just the tools given to them and be successful.

This has not been the case for over a decade now. There is simply too much competition to expect to succeed with basic tools and tricks. That competition is not only with rival companies. A great deal of the competition is from the very community inside each business. That’s what happens when you get 30,000 people all using the same capture page and marketing the same way. Even though many people may be signing up for a company, there is no reason to care who you sign under if every website is a clone.

When I realized this, I began to research personal branding. What I found is what those 99% of marketers never consider. The top marketers on the web work very hard to build a personal brand that people will see and remember. You see, if someone is looking to join a business they tend to look through several websites and try to pick the best one, based on what they see and feel. If they look through 10 websites for one company, and 9 of them look exactly the same, they are not going to go back to the 9 clones. It’s the one that had a real person, talking about real experiences that will get the return visit. The site that was set up by a professional. Not the sites that were obviously free with the business.

Fact. No matter how great a job your company did at setting up the best, most well tested landing page, if 30,000 people are using it, it is basically usless. It is the marketer with his own branded website, that can be optimized to reach high in the search results, that will make the top money.

It gives prospects a chance to get to know you. To feel a bond with you. Tell them your story and they can relate to you. If they remember who you are, and you have a web presence, they can find you again. One of my top work from home businesses is CarbonCopyPRO. There is a lot of money to made in top tier online business. More than most people realize. Now I analyze everything before making a decision. The sponsor I chose was a website I found 2 months before I joined, and had saved to favorites. I visited many of the companies websites during that time, and 90% of them were basically the same thing. Now that is a shame, considering that CCPro stresses the importance, and even gives you the tools to tie a personal site to them. A company that successful knows how to market. The problem is, that even people joining a business as well thought out as CCpro don’t seem to follow the simple directions. They still try to market the starter pages.

The effective way to market an online business is to have your own site or capture page, with your personal story, and link it to your companies sales pages. That way you market yourself instead of a business being marketed by thousands of others, and your companies well thought out tools still handle the rest of the process.

Your odds of success go up exponentially with a branded online presence. Aside from the obvious is the fact that if you have full control over the content of your capture pages, you have full control over your keyword options. That opens up the world of advertising for you that most of your companies community doesn’t have. If you can set your own keywords for SEO and ad campaigns you can have your site show up in places that the rest of your company doesn’t have the option for.

Top marketers know this stuff, and now, so do you. It is the sole reason I started my own website design company to begin with. This is the business that is making people rich. Once you have your own web presence, and get some education on online business marketing, it doesn’t really matter anymore which one of the thousands of work from home businesses that you choose. You can be successful with any legitimate work from home business opportunity. And since I play a role in almost every other area of online marketing, it only seemed natural to start this company to compliment the others.

Then it is all a matter of preference. MLM, direct marketing, network marketing or top tier. You can do them all or pick one. You can profit from affiliate opportunities while you market your primary opportunity. The possibilities are endless.

It all starts with an online presence. So get one, and get paid.

Chris Owen

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It’s a brave new world on the net these days. With constantly changing times and more businesses than ever turning to the net, competition is getting tough.

Getting your site to the top of the search results has always been a challenge, but with the amount of sites hitting the web now, it is more challenging than ever. It is also estimated that more than ten million more businesses will go online by 2015. So the competition is only going to grow from here.

Here at Chris Owen Web Designs we build full SEO optimized websites for each client. We also help you find effective keywords for search engine optimization techniques that you can use to build your marketing campaigns.

Adding additional options to your site are limitless. From opt-in boxes, and shopping carts to embedded video, we can give you all the tools you need to be competitive in todays online markets.

If you are a small business owner needing a web presence, or you need a personal branded website for your network marketing or direct sales business, we are here to meet your needs.

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