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Internet marketing is not rocket science. However, there is MUCH to learn before any success can be enjoyed! Most beginners simply quit before they see success. However, for those willing to learn and take action, the rewards can be awesome!

1. Do not invest much money in your first site. This is the great thing about the Internet! There is almost no risk and the rewards are all but unlimited. If you can’t make money on a low cost start-up, you won’t make any money no matter how much you spend on the site. You MUST learn search engine marketing and site design! I began our first site, Cactus Canyon, with a low hosting account and one case of product I bought for $200! There is not another business opportunity ANYWHERE with such low risk and high reward possibilities.

2. Google’s ranking criteria consists of about 150+ different variables. Relevant content and the number of incoming, one-way links from relevant sites are at the top of the list. It is virtually impossible for a new site to get many one-way links. Therefore, CONTENT is the key! Plenty of keyword rich content which is ORIGINAL and properly optimized will result in good rankings for your site

3. If you have someone else design and build your site, you must insure they have a good working knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet marketing in general. If they don’t have a clue, find someone else. Better yet, learn to design your site yourself. In my opinion, your chances of success are slim to none if you don’t learn how to create and modify your site yourself. I don’t know of any successful Internet marketers who can’t create simple sites. Many will out-source this job later, but in the beginning almost everyone must build their own. It is not rocket science. Take the time to learn simple website design if you are serious about making money on the Internet.

4. The more pages of content the better. Set goals for content creation. Imagine if you only created one page of content per day in the coming year! Imagine the content rich site you would have even after just six months! Read my blog post here about how to get traffic with plenty of content.

5. Write your content page AFTER you have determined the exact keyword phrase you will use and then optimize with it. Never write content simply for the sake of writing content. Make sure you KNOW how to use SEO correctly

6. Remember that keyword phrases 3 and 4 words long are MUCH easier to rank for. Although there are many more searches for “dogs” than “dog training tips”, it will be far easier to get traffic to the page optimized with the longer phrase. PLUS the people who search for and find your “dog training tips” page will be interested in EXACTLY what your page is about.

7. Think NICHE! The Internet is HUGE, and so is the competition! But no matter what the area is, there are enough niche areas within it to generate a LOT of traffic and profits once you know how to research for them and their keywords. Choose the wrong niche, and the rest of your effort is usually wasted.

8. Keep your site’s theme narrow. Google LOVES themes! In other words, for a dog site, focusing on a narrow theme will make it more attractive to Google. All things being equal, a hundred page site about dogs in general will have less respect from Google than a 100 page site about dog training. Keep your site focused!

9. NEVER pay money to a company to “Get your site submitted to hundreds of search engines”. This is a COMPLETE waste of money. Likewise, never think “email blasts” and “1000’s of incoming links” packages are the answer. If you wonder if something is a scam, tweet me and ask!

10. In fact, NEVER sign up with a company which promises 100’s of incoming links! This is just too good to be true and is. AND it could get your site banned if Google thinks you are personally participating in link spamming! There are no free lunches in Internet Marketing. Before you pay money for any type of listing or linking service, PLEASE write to me and let us talk about it first! Don’t end up shooting yourself in the foot!

11. Be careful about spending money for even “legitimate” links. Matt Cutts with Google has stated that Google minimizes the importance of the link if they think it is paid link. And as I said earlier, the Google spiders are VERY smart.

12. After you have a dozen or so pages of original content published to the web, go ahead and start submitting them manually to relevant directories. There is no need to pay anyone to get your site indexed by the search engines!

13. You can submit your site directly to Google and Yahoo if you wish, but the search engines will give your page more relevance if they find its link in some other way; like at the directories which you submitted to. I never bother submitting directly to Google or Yahoo anymore. My new sites won’t get indexed any faster than if I simply submit them to the directories. Besides, when Google sees links to it from another site, they will give my new site more relevance.

14. Do not spend your time or money on pay-per-click advertising like Google AdWords until you have traffic and sales coming from regular, “organic” searches. The learning curve is high for pay-per-click success. Your time and money should be spent learning basic search engine marketing. Short of “pure luck”, beginners always lose money with AdWords. Remember, search engine optimization will often be your most effective marketing strategy.

15. I believe in Karma. I also try to always follow the golden rule. When I am researching competitors in Adwords, I never click on their AdWords links just to do research. Every click costs them money. I always copy and paste the URL within the ad into a browser and visit it from there. I sure wouldn’t want people clicking on my ads if they knew they had no intentions of buying anything. It simply isn’t nice to do that to people.

16. Never just copy and paste content into your page from another site. Even if the other site gives you permission, it will prevent your pages from ranking well. Google will penalize for duplicate content.

17. You can begin with a simple and free web editor. I have a free one and complete video guides in Real WebSite Pro. However, every marketer will soon see the benefits of upgrading to a robust editor like Dreamweaver or xSitePro. Internet marketing has low costs, but it is not “money for nothing” as some believe. Read more here about building a site.

18. NEVER use the built-in templates of Microsoft’s FrontPage or any of the many online wizards available to create your sites. These create extremely bloated code! Do not use them. Every serious Internet marketer learns simple web design.

19. Meta keyword tags used to be very important. But now days Google and Yahoo don’t use them for rankings because they were abused by spammers for so long. Meta keyword tags won’t help you in Google, but they CAN HURT you if used wrong! NEVER put the same meta tag contents into each page. The meta tag descriptions and keywords MUST be unique to each page! If the page is only about dog training, don’t use a meta keyword for cat diseases. Although Google does not consider meta keywords, you should still use proper ones since some smaller search engines do consider them.

20. Be sure to use your keyword phrase as the title of the page. It is best to only have the keyword phrase in the title and nothing else. One exception to this is if the page is selling a product. In this case it works very well to put the price right after the keyword. An example might be “Small Dog Collars – $4.99”. The title is what shows up in bold in the search engine results. If you are selling something, you want to attract people interested in making a purchase. Having the price show up in the title will let possible buyers know they can buy small dog collars from your page. Buyers are more likely to click on those links with prices in the title.

21. Google considers hidden text “cheating”. You must not have text on the page of the same color as the page’s background. In fact, even if it is close, Google can ban your entire site! Never think you can outsmart Google! Never.

22. Even though most hosting companies provide some type of site statistics for page views, referrers, etc., Google Analytics provides the very best free solution. You will be amazed at the information Google Analytics will provide about the visitors to your site. Be sure to study this information for clues on how you can increase traffic. For example, you may see that a certain search term you hadn’t thought about is bringing people to your site. At that point you could optimize more pages for the keyword and get more of a share of those searches.

23. Forget FLASH or fancy scripts on your site. Cactus Canyon is made with only text, tables and images; and it has 3 or 4 dozen pages showing up on Google’s first pages for various search terms. Although I now create new pages with CSS because they are easier in the long run, (and search engines like their clean code too!) there is no reason your simple HTML site can’t do very well in the search engines! Remember, it is the CONTENT which Google is looking at – not how great your design skills are. Which would you rather have? A pretty, eye-catching site which makes its way to page 22 in a Google search, or a simple “homemade” looking site on page 1 of the search results? Get my point?

24. ALWAYS go to other computers and look at your site on another computer! There are ways to get faked out if you create and view your site on the same computer! It is best if you can actually do this, but if you have to you can phone a friend to take a look at it for you. But you MUST view your site in different browsers and screen resolutions! Otherwise you can end up making some very embarrassing mistakes.

25. Your navigation structure is crucial. When a search engine visits a page on your site, your navigation structure should make it easy for the search engine spider to navigate and index all the other pages of your site. It is best to have the navigation links at the top or the left side of your pages.

26. If possible, your linking structure should be composed of text links and NOT images. The difference is that the anchor text of the link will give your linked page more relevance. In other words, a link to a page about dog collars with a text link, “dog collars”, will mean more for a search engine than if you have a picture of a dog collar linking to your dog collar page. AVOID any type of “fly out” navigation system. Some of those scripts are not search engine friendly. Stick to the basics; simple text links are the best. If you want to dress up the links a little, it is possible to use CSS to create rollover effects without sacrificing search engine optimization. There are plenty of help pages on the web which will show how you how to configure a CSS file for this purpose.

27. Google and other search engines like sites that change often. This does not mean to go in and totally revamp your home page every month! This can actually be a deadly mistake! Adding more pages and linking to them is the best way to keep your site fresh. Again, if you have a page ranking well, don’t make too many changes to it!

28. Before someone will buy something on your site, they must trust you. There are two ways to build trust with your site’s visitors. One is to have a very professional looking site. It will be very difficult for the new site owner to build a “very professional” looking site. One could pay three or four thousand dollars for site designed by a professional web designer, but we don’t want to invest much money because we don’t need to in order to be successful.

The other method of building trust is to make the site more personal. If the potential customers can relate to you, if they feel they sort of know you, if you have some pictures of yourself on the site, or pictures of your dogs, or talk about your home town, or…and the list goes on. But my point is is that your site can be relatively plain looking and still be VERY successful so long as people trust it. Just look at CactusCanyon.com for a perfect example of this.

29. That being said, it doesn’t mean you should go out of your way to make your site look cheap or cheesy. You probably don’t want to use animated .gif images. In most cases these cheapen the look of the site. Don’t try to use background images or colors for the background. White is always the safest color. Just take a look at all the major sites; they use white backgrounds. Do not try to reinvent the wheel!

30. There are plenty of sites on the web selling terrific looking templates which you can edit for your site. However, unless you know web design VERY well and can significantly edit the pages by working with the pages in a web editor, they will be useless to you. Instead of trying this shortcut, simply learn to create your own simple sites!

31. DO NOT spend hours and hours and hours trying to perfect your site. Instead, spend most of those hours reading about and practicing Internet Marketing and writing more content pages. Stop trying to make your site “perfect” looking. Remember, in the beginning, “good is good enough”. Once your site or idea shows promise, then you can go back and tweak more.

32. NEVER spend more than $7.95 per month for hosting your first site! Here is the host I use to host many sites for just $7.95 a month.

33. Do NOT pay for a robust shopping cart system right off for your new site. Even if your hosting company offers a free shopping cart scripts, I still suggest using PayPal’s free shopping cart until you are getting 3 or 4 orders per day. The reason for this is that the PayPal shopping cart is not only free, but it is extremely simple. The learning curve for other shopping carts is quite high. You need to spend your time marketing your site early on instead of learning a shopping cart system which will not get much use without spending sufficient time on marketing and driving traffic to your site! Once your site begins making a few sales per day, I’d think about upgrading to a more robust shopping cart. Here’s the shopping cart I use.

34. If your site sells products, you MUST take credit cards. And I highly suggest you take PayPal too. Like it or hate it, a LOT of people use PayPal. Over 20% of our sales at Cactus Canyon come from customers using PayPal. In most cases you will have to have a merchant account from your bank in order to accept credit cards. There is usually a monthly fee of about twenty dollars for this plus the transaction fees. However, the free PayPal shopping cart allows you to take all major credit cards without having to invest in your own merchant account. Although there are still transaction fees with each purchase (with a similar percentage as a merchant account charges), PayPal does not have a monthly minimum or any type of monthly charge at all. You only pay the per transaction fee.

35. Phone orders are a problem for the small Internet business selling physical products. Some people refuse to use their credit card on the web. Of course almost all Internet businesses use an online merchant account validation system. When a customer calls in an order, the web business will simply input the information online into the same shopping cart the customer could have used!

That being said, here is how we handle phone calls: We pay $6.95 per month for an 800 number service provider and then 25 cents per minute for its use. We have the number sent to a recording where we ask the caller to leave a message so we can return their call. The message they leave is then forwarded to our email inbox where we can check it there and then return the call. This works pretty well since we don’t have a dedicated person by the phone all the time.

36. You should probably also take checks and money orders depending upon what you sell. We sell nutritional products. We always have taken personal checks and money orders. We have only had two bad money orders (and never a returned check!) in many hundreds of orders paid for with checks and money orders. Also, we have never hold checks until they clear. We always ship right away. Maybe if we were selling higher priced items, we would reconsider this policy, but for now it works well for us.

37. USPS has the best rates for shipping smaller sized packages. UPS, DHL and FEDEX have better rates for larger packages. Do research in order to determine what your best shipping choice is. Always use free electronic delivery confirmation labels with USPS. Always ship the same or next day if possible. Your customers will return time and again if they know they will receive their orders quickly! Send a delivery notification email for every order. I still send a personal mail to every one of our customers who place an order. People love this kind of personal service!

38. Keep a list of your customers’ email addresses. The list is like money in the bank! If your site ever falls out of favor with the search engines, at least you will have your customer list which you can market to. In this case you want to MAKE SURE that you treated those customers right in the first place! Customer service is your number one priority after the sale!

39. Do not pay more than $9.95 per year for your domain registrations. I have all my domains registered here . They only charge $9.95 per year and have the best tech support of any Internet company I have ever dealt with.

40. Many hosting companies offer special deals which offer such things as a five page site which is easy to create. These are template sites which they have scripts which make them easy to create. But you will be very limited with what you can do with your site. Learn web design yourself and do it all the right way. Again, there are no free lunches when it comes to Internet marketing.

41. Keep your file structure as simple as possible with your site. Unless you know for sure that your site may eventually contain many hundreds of files, I suggest just putting all the files on the root. The only exception to this is that you may wish to have an image folder for all your images.

42. DO NOT put your .htm files into subdirectories. Keep all your individual web pages on the root. For young sites, Google is not likely to immediately index any pages which are deeper than the root. If you think your site could contain many hundreds of pages some day, you may think about categorizing the files into folders. This is not something you can do later. What structure you start with you must keep due to the way the search engines index pages.

43. A warning about DUPLICATE CONTENT: Your site will be penalized by the search engines if they see too much duplicate content within the site. For example, Cactus Canyon sells two types of liquid glucosamine products. They are both designed to do the same thing. I simply can’t copy and paste the benefits of using one into a page about the benefits of using the other. I have to REWRITE the benefits into original content for the other product. It must be UNIQUE. Check your pages at www.CopyScape.com to insure the content is original.

Also, say you want to move a page from this path, yoursite/dogs/dog-collars.htm to yoursite/dog-collars.htm. You can’t simply delete the first files location and put the file into the new location even though it is the same file. The search engines will think the new location is a new file. They will not immediately blank out from their memory the other files location. They will still consider this situation to be two files. And since they are both the same, the new location will be considered duplicate content and penalized! It is best to leave the other page where it is and rewrite a new page for the new location. Be careful about duplicate content. Always think about the consequences of doing things which the search engines may perceive as being duplicated content.

44. If you set up a WordPress blog, MAKE SURE you know how to tweak its settings to make it search-engine-friendly. Otherwise, you are wasting your time.

45. Before “jumping into a project” always sleep on it and do your research first! I used to “jump right in”, spend a lot of time on some new idea, and then the next morning the idea didn’t look so good. I wasted a lot of time doing that until I learned to “sleep on it” first.

46. If you have a site and are NOT building a list, you are leaving money on the table! The money is in the list! Beginners too often put off this very important step!

47. My hard drive is FULL of files; all kinds of files. Once your Internet business has been going for a while you too will have more files accumulated than you ever dreamed. Sometimes finding a specific file is a big problem! I finally discovered Google Desktop. This search software is so cool! You download it free from Google and install it. It spends a few hours indexing your entire hard drive. After that you can go do a Google search on your desktop and actually find any file you look for. This search program is MUCH better than the built-in Windows search feature. I highly suggest it for saving time.

48. Do something EVERY DAY for your business…no matter what. I have succeeded with this almost every day for the past several years. There is so much work to be done, that if you think about it in large terms, it is too overwhelming. But if you decide to do at least something every day, it will all add up. Some days you may only be able to spend time browsing an Internet marketing forum. Other days you may be able to spend 6 or 7 hours writing new content. But it is important to do SOMETHING every day!

49. Before deciding to sell a product online. Make sure you ask the manufacturer if you are allowed to sell online. Some manufacturers forbid it because they are afraid it will cut into their profits. Others welcome you to. And still others may allow it on the Internet but not on eBay. Don’t spend any time on an idea until you find out for sure you are allowed to promote it online. This advice is especially true when it comes to MLM products.

50. If you are planning on putting AdSense on your site, don’t put it on there right away. Wait until you are getting traffic and the page is indexed in Yahoo. Google won’t care if you have it on there from the start, but there are some webmasters who believe that Yahoo may penalize a brand new site which has AdSense on it. The site won’t make any AdSense money anyway in the beginning, so there is no reason for putting AdSense on the pages until it is indexed in all the major search engines. Simply design the site so it will be easy to insert the code where you want it later on.

Dedicated To Your Success,

Steve Weber

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