Inc. Magazine interview on how to start a web business.

It's not everyday I get a call
from Inc. Magazine to be interviewed.  The distinguished
writer J. J. McCorvy called because he was writing an article about how-to start
a successful web business.

I'm very honored!  It's amazing
to be recognized by such a well respected magazine.  It only took me fifteen
short years in the business..:-)

We did a thirty-minute phone
interview and then I submitted some follow up notes.  I thought you'd like to
see the notes, so here they are..

(begin
notes)
Here are a few specific tips for building a successful web
business.

Presenting Your Website.

There
should be an undeniable, clear one-sentence description the benefit your
business provides on the home-page.

Example: BestWebsite.com
says “The Best Website book shows how to make $10,000 a month
with your website.”

Search
Engine Rankings.

Understand
the #1 reason Google, Yahoo, Bing ect., uses to determine how they rank your
website, is the number of high-quality links pointing to your website.  The more
you have, the higher you rank for better keywords.

Example:  You
can have 300 low-quality links pointing to your website, and one link from a
high-quality website and that one link counts for more.  If you'd like to know
what a high-quality link is, type in the main keywords for your industry and see
the websites listed on the first three pages.

How-to
Get High-Quality Links.

The
best way to get high-quality links is to create compelling content.  Forget
about quantity, spend your time creating genuine quality and you will eventually
be rewarded.

Example
1:  I
shot an 8-minute video titled “Internet
Marketing - $100,000 from your website in 30 days.” If you
type in the highly competitive keyword “internet marketing” into YouTube.com you
can see the video shows up on the first page.

Example
2: 
LostLettermen.com writes compelling content about college sports.  Then e-mails
ESPN, Sports Illustrated and Rivals links to the articles.  About a third of the
time they actually pick them up, which boosts traffic by more than 100,000
unique visitors a month. (see my post
for specifics.)

Keywords
and Search Engine Optimization.

Go
for the most specific, laser targeted keywords first.  They are much easier to
get and convert sales at an extremely high rate.

Example:  The
most specific keyword for my book is “internet marketing book.”  I used the
keyword in the Title tag on the homepage and used the keyword a few other times
written somewhere on the homepage.  Then I used Digg.com, Delicious.com and
Squidoo.com to submit to and that was it, 11 days later BestWebsite.com was
ranked on the first page of Google.

Designing
Your Website.

If
possible don't use a professional web design studio to design your website,
unless you don't mind at least a $1-$2000 monthly charge to continue to update
your website and $5-10,000 up front or more.  Almost everyone who chooses to do
it this way determines that it is a headache and not worth the
money.

Keep
it in-house, if possible.  Then make a choice between either using one of the
two main web design tools like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression
Web.($149)  The way to think about these tools is this, they’re like Photoshop,
they can do anything you can dream up, but they're difficult to learn and
manage.

If
you're looking to keep costs down, and make the Web design learning curve
easier.  Choose one of the blogging tools like TypePad.com or
WordPress.com.(9.95/mo)  The blogging platforms have become much more robust now
and allow you to do things like using your own URL, adding additional pages,
inserting custom HTML code, run a newsletter, display twitter info, and almost
anything else you can imagine.

Choosing one of the blogging
platforms to design your website is now the best choice for most businesses
because you can design and manage your entire website through a Web browser.  If
you need maximum flexibility, for instance, you have hundreds of products for
sale.  You'll need to go with one of the big two web design tools; Dreamweaver
or Expression Web.
(end notes)

I don't have
a publication date for the article yet.  If you'd like more detailed notes on
how-to start a successful web business my 2-page cliff's notes version
of my book has proved helpful for many.

Client Types