The Internet in Business is as important as Blood in body!

What do I mean by this? Your body would not function without blood, so I am suggesting that your business will not function without the Internet, or certainly without a good website presence!

These days with the Internet being so huge and a place where most people now go in the first instance to look for products and services, if you don’t have a good website that has been optimised well your business will flounder!

Looking closer at ‘Internet in Business’ and the comparison analogy with the human body. One could argue that your website is like the heart in the body – the heart pumps the life-giving blood around the body supplying nutrients and oxygen to all parts of the body to keep it alive! In the same way your website is like the heart in the Internet, pumping prospects to your business, which are the life blood of business.

So in the same way a healthy body needs a fit and healthy heart, a business needs a fit and health (or well written and optimised) website that delivers a good, constant stream of new customers to your business.

One of the biggest battles in the search for business is getting your website found on the internet – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay per Click (PPC). You may be thinking that this is another article about SEO and if you were you will be forgiven for thinking this, but it’s not at all…

SEO is a vital part of your online business, but it is not where it ends! Let me explain further…

People only buy when they:

1. Know your company;
2. Like what they see, and;
3. Trust you or your company.

So once you have spent your money attracting people to your website, you now need to direct your attention to converting those prospects into paying customers by working on the above list, so how do you do this?

One way to get them to know your company or the products you sell is to offer free or very low cost options, so they can either try before they buy or not have to spend too much to find out if your service works. With thousands of scams and get rich quick schemes out there, people are quite rightly very cautious when buying from an unknown website on the Internet, so you need to help them break down that brick wall that stands between them and you or at least begin to remove some of those bricks from that wall.

It takes multiples of marketing cash to convert a prospect into a customer compared to the amount it takes to convert an existing customer into a returning customer. This is why it is important to get your visitors to experience your products so they not only get to know the products, but also how your business operates. Doing it this way will make the purchase decisions much easier and any initial objections they may have had will begin to disappear – brick by brick!

It will be a stage by stage process from your free or cheaper products through to your more expensive products. Obviously, not all customers can afford the more expensive items and possible will not even need or want them, but where they do it is important for them to know and trust you before they purchase.

If you imagine a funnel and you are feeding prospective customers into the top along with your spend on SEO and PPC etc, with the hope that you get trusting and satisfied customers out at the bottom along with the cash they spend on your products and services. You will need to attract a huge number of potential customers in at the top end, to gradually develop their trust in you and your products and services so that they end up coming out at the bottom of the funnel spending cash with you.

When you have enough happy customers ask for testimonials, as these are extremely powerful in helping to convert other potential customer into a paying customer!

Other free offerings in addition to your existing products include: Ezines; E-books, Webinars and special reports, with the idea being to entice your prospects along with giving them confidence in what you do. You could also try to produce an audio or video for your customers to watch online or to download for free so they can see that you are an ‘actual person’ or that actual people exist in your business.

Videos are a great way to introduce you and to explain your products or services to prospective customers. These videos also provide an opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise in your field. Also, don’t forget that for a prospects to receive your free products or services, they will have to provide you with their contact details, name and email address for example, so that you can contact them again and again – but don’t pester people unnecessarily!

It is important to recognise that people are different and as a result people will have different preferences as to how they would prefer to receive information. This preference might be to have a free version of your product to download or for them to read a free report. Other prospects might prefer to listen to the same material as an audio track or to watch a video presentation, all of which should be downloadable so that they can listen or watch them in their own time.

Once your prospects have experienced your expertise and have sampled your products and start to know, like, and trust you, they are more likely to open their wallets and spend more money on your services and products.

If you have a business you will know how important it is to get press releases out there on the Internet.

A press release is an article witter about your business that will provide information to potential customers as well as existing customers to help them decide on whether to buy from you.

Getting a press release out there will also help in getting links back to your own website be it for traffic purposes or for Google page rank reasons – either or both are good.

In-business has a business forum on which has a press release section for businesses on the internet to post articles about their own business for FREE.

So if you want to post your own business press release click this link.

If you are not sure what blogging is and you are a bit unclear about setting up your own business blogging site then this article might help you to get started.

Website URL
Before starting any website or blog you need to understand what the term URL stands for, which is – Uniform Resource Locator and in layman’s terms URL is the address of the page of a website or a blog. If you look at the top bar you will see that the URL on this page is http://www.in-business.org.uk/what-is-blogging/.

Blog
You might be wondering what a blog is, as there are still many people out there that might have heard of the term, but are still unsure as to what it this term means. The term blog is an abbreviation of “Web Log” which is effectively what it is, as a blog is a diary of posts listed in date order and displayed on the Web or Internet.

Blogging Platform
This is the background software which is used to create and run your blog and in most cases there is no need to pay for this software, as there are plenty of adequate free ones out there. The most popular are WordPress and Blogger (Blogger is not as good as WordPress, as you cannot use this as a sub-directory to your main site, if that is what you desire, so WordPress would be better) you can also use Joomla too and there are others too.

Blogging
So if you have a blog then you are a Blogger and then the process of creating and posting an article in a blog is called blogging.

Blogger
Someone who owns a blog and posts about a subject they know – a niche showing their expertise.

Within the blog you will have certain sections and terminology you need to understand, as follows:

Post
As noted before a blog is a log on the web of articles in date order and each one of these articles is referred to as a post.

Comments
Once you have published a post, blogging software allows visitors to your site to make comments about your post, which is what makes a blogging site different to a normal website. You have full control over these comments and there is software to help protect you against spammers. I recommend if you use WordPress for your blog that you use Akismet which will automatically detect those pea brained spammers out there.

Category
Certainly if you use WordPress you can categorise each post under one or more Categories, which helps visitors to read posts that have been categorised into certain topic areas.

RSS feed
The RSS feed where RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” or alternatively “Rich Site Summary” and allows people to subscribe to receive information from the likes of blogs and to receive news headlines that they consider interesting. In order to receive and read these headlines you will need a Feed Reader. Every blog will have a link to a RSS feed and all blog posts will be listed on this feed and looks like this – if you click this RSS Feed link for in-business.

Blogroll
On each blog site there will be a set of links to other blogs or websites that a blogger considers to be relevant to the content of the blog. These site links are sometimes listed in the Blogroll; however, this heading can be changed to suit your site.

Archives
Each month that passes your blog posts will be aggregated into the month in which the post was made and then these are listed under the Archives section of the blog. You will then be able to click on the blogs prior months to see what was written in those months.

Ping
A pig is something that is very useful for blogs and the search engines. Each time that a post published on a blog the post page is “Pinged” off to all the major search engines. This in tern leads the search engines to visit your site and then update their directory and record your new content. Once your blog has got a high relevance on the Internet you can find that a post will be found on the likes of Google within hours of posting. The following are “Ping sites:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2/

This means that the search engines contain up to the minute information about your blog and is why blogs are so important for traffic to your business and your company website.

To answer the question “Does my business need a blog?” then you need to look at how it can benefit you before deciding on whether you need one or not.

These days many businesses are adding a blog to their website, as they firstly acknowledge that it is a good traffic generation tool and it helps to tell your audience that you know what you are talking about…let me explain…

Every time you post a page on the internet you give yourself another opportunity of getting that page found on the internet by potential customers. It is worth researching key search terms for your business and your business products and services. Once you have researched this by using SEO tools like Wordtracker FREE keyword suggestion tool you can use these key words to create posts that will be searched for on the Internet and then find your site.

Once you have your “Key Phrases” which include your “Key Words” you can then start to build web pages based around these words. Using a blog for this purpose you can write articles based upon your key words, which will not only be found if they have been optimised correctly, but will also tell your customers more about that particular service.

In your article on the blog the title should include your “Key Phrase” and “Key Words” and then you should go on to include the same phrases within the article, some of which should be boldened and at least one of them linking off to your main website. This will help the search engines to index your page and thereby find you for the terms you desire.

If you do decide to have a blog associated with your business website then I suggest you use good blogging software like WordPress, which is what has been used to run this blog – and what is great is the software is FREE!

Once you decide to have a blog you must make sure that you keep the content up-to-date and you must make sure that you write articles on a regular basis – I would suggest at a very minimum of one per month, which would mean 12-articles per year, but even better one per week. You can get your employees to help with article ideas and topics and get them to help with writing them, so that you spread the load.

If you are looking to print business cards for your business then be careful about using services that offer “free business cards”.

There are two things to point out to you about these so called “free business cards” and the first is to be careful of companies like Vistaprint! We needed business cards in one of my businesses and our manager at the time recommended Vistaprint tome. My manager told me that the cards are free, so I thought why not and agreed to let her go ahead and order some “Free” cards – well we did pay for them because we wanted to add some extra services.

The cards arrived, but and a BIG BUT – my business card started to get charged with £9.95 per month for some kind of subscription service, which I am still not sure what this is.

When we contacted Vistaprint, which was not an easy thing to do in the first place, as they seem to make it incredibly difficult for customers to make direct contact, they agreed to cancel the subscription and did originally offer to refund the money already paid out. However, nothing of the sort happened and I felt that I was simply told a lie, I also feel that this was simply a delay tactic so that they could then take yet more £9.95 payments. Vistaprint never did cancel the direct debit and when we tried to make contact again we found it impossible to do so – they also never repaid the monies taken from my bank that were never knowingly agreed to in the first place!

The only way to cancel this was to contact our bank directly, who stopped any future payments, however, we were left out of pocket and no refund was made. What apparently happens is that when you register for the free cards, if you want to upgrade the business cards, if for example, you want to have then delivered more quickly, then you pay for this using a credit card. Vistprint then automatically subscribe you to this £9.95 per month charge and you only find out when you get your next bank or credit card statement.

To me this is a shoddy practice and to be blunt - it is a “Scam” – if you type in “Vistaprint scam” to a search engine you will see many websites listed telling you not to use Vistaprint and quite frankly I agree with this. I would certainly never recommend a company like this and would never ever use them again!

The secondary reason for not using “Free Business Cards” is that when you give them out to other business people they look “Free” and people get to know the designs used by these companies – so you look “Cheap” in front of other business people. It is much better to have your own corporate ID and logo on your own business card design, which in most cases does not usually cost the earth to produce when you use a reputable printing company.

To increase traffic to your business website and to improve your rankings on the search engines and on sites like Alexa then you should look at business directory registering.

A business directory like for example U.K.Business directory receives high traffic volumes (this site had an Alexa ranking of 105,184 on the day of writing this article, which is a respectable traffic rank). Business directories like this tend to be top of the search engines for business type searches and if your site is listed then you will receive your share of this traffic.

It might be that you are listed under one category and the person looking for one service might see your site under another category too, or even simply find you for the search they made in the first place.

To find other business directories to get listed in simply do a search on the term “Business Directory” or “Business Directories” in your favourite search engine and then go through this list. You will normally have to enter a reciprocal link to the directory site and in some cases you might need to pay an annual fee.

In my opinion you should be able to find enough directories that offer a free listing in their directory so you should not need to pay for this service. However, sometimes by paying a fee you get listed quicker and you can get a priority listing at the top of your section.

If you have a blog or if you are looking to set up a blog then to help promote your posts you should submit it to a number of blog directories.

Blog directories are a source of traffic and will help your ranking in the search engines so I recommend that you register with as many of these blog directories as you can:

Blogarama – Get Listed At One Of The Largest FREE Blog Directories Online. Let People Find And Rate Your Blog In The Blog Directory!  

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Bloghub – Bloghub.com is an online directory and community where members from around the world gather and exchange ideas. If you run a blog site, you can add your site to their blog directory, search their blogger directory for blog templates, blog skins, create blog or join them for a chat at their exciting online Blogger forum.

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Blogflux – “No matter which subject you choose to write your blog about, and no matter what theme you choose or have made for your site – there is one thing, and one thing only, that will truly make your blog …” is what they say at Blogflux!  

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Blogtoplist – 68223 blogs in the directory at the time of writing this article. Statistics resets every week. Get live statistics over your blog, reach thousands of new readers, get ranked by a new unique way, 100% Free to submit your blog(s). 

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Topblogarea – Submit to this blog directory and get 100% free to sign up, thousands of new visitors, use their free blog tools and free Statistics over your blog.  

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Ontoplist – With this blog directory you can – Publish your blog and distribute content, get and manage your own blog ranking, connect with other bloggers, share your blog with the world and it is Free.

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Bloggapedia – Bloggapedia is a blog directory, blog search engine and a social network for bloggers. Register now to find other bloggers and blog posts that you like!  

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Blogcatalog – Blog Catalog is the premiere social blog directory on the internet. Search, Browse, Rate and Review thousands of blog sites.

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You can also claim your blog at Technorati – Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation. Founded as the first blog search engine, Technorati has expanded to a full service media company providing services to the blogs and social media sites and connecting them with advertisers who want to join the conversation, and whose online properties introduce blog content to millions of consumers.

I felt it necessary to write something about Internet Business Scams, as I get bombarded with emails all the time on spurious offers!

The most obvious one is the Nigerian (or similar) that has millions of Dollars that he or she needs to be transferred to your bank account and the scam usually involves some official or government minister. This internet scam also involves you sharing in the funds so that you are promised to receive several million dollars yourself! – if you have not seen one of these emails or if you are not aware of this scam – note that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!”

If anyone has been scammed by this type of fraudster then please post your comments here, as I and others are sure to want to know. The way I understand that this works is that they get your bank details and ask you to deposit funds into one of their own banks in order to set the deal up.

If you get sucked in and deposit the first amount requested, they then come up with a reason why you should deposit more…and so on. It was reported a while ago that one person ended up loosing some £50,000 in one of these Nigerian Internet Business Scams!

Other types of Internet Business Scams are whereby you are promised to make a fortune overnight, when in fact there is little chance of doing anything of the sort. There are many MLM schemes or Multi Level Marketing schemes out there that promise the world and in reality have no substance.

My suggestion would be to use known and reputed affiliate programs like Commission Junction or DGM and set up your own website whereby your visitors click on links to your own affiliates, whereby you earn a commission for every sale made from the traffic you send their way.

If however, you are considering a MLM scheme please use your common sense and take time to check out the company. Ask to speak with existing MLM members and ask for testimonials. Make sure that the company does have an office and you might even want to get a copy of their accounts from Companies House if it is a UK company, or the official government organisation where company accounts are submitted in your country or of where the company is registered.

When looking at an MLM type scheme look at whether their claims seem realistic and also look at how long there particular scheme has been running for. Has the market already been saturated with the product or are the claims that the company makes about the product realistic. See if you can get copies of customer testimonials to verify any claims.

It is unlikely that you will make money quickly in whatever you do – there are many “Get Rich Quick Schemes” out there that simply do not work. These companies work on people’s emotions and one of these emotions they work on is greed and the need to have money. They also suggest that you will make it without too much hard work – think about this very carefully.

Business on the internet exploded in the early days with porn and porn sites and the “sale of sex” in all forms and this continues to do so – Sex sells, as they say!

To just show how important the word “SEX” is on the Internet and that “Sex Sells” is that if you “Google” the word sex you get 743,000,000 results, however, I did some playing around with some other Google searches and was surprised to find the results shown in the table below.

I will admit that I expected the search term “Sex” to be top of this list – so I have learnt something new today – it is said that you learn something new each day!

So I then decided to do some more research and typed in the search term “internet revenue statistics” to find the highest revenue earner on the Internet and was surprised to see a website with a title “Internet Pornography Statistics – TopTenREVIEWS” of the 330,000 results was No. 1 on Google!

This was not quite what I was looking for or even expected, but might in itself be revealing about could still be the main business revenue generator on the World-Wide-Web!

As I had found this site, it was worth a look and it gave some statistics for 2006 Worldwide Pornography Revenues, where China was top of the list spending $27.4 Billion per annum on porn (representing $27.41 per capita).

However, the highest, per capita spend was in South Korea where on average each person spends $526.76 on porn making a total of $25.73 billion annual spend in total for the country! To see the full details of this report go to Internet Pornography Statistics.

Highest Internet Revenue Earner

However, this is not what I was looking for – I would like to find what is the Highest Internet Revenue Earner and whether there are other businesses on the Internet that have overtaken the “Porn Boom” from the early days of the Internet.

I think the billions of revenue earned from porn on the Internet is going to take some beating – what I also found interesting was the number of search results for “Poker” sites or online gambling – the revenue generated from online gambling is expected to be around $18 billion by 2010, which is no where near the adult industry revenues!

So if you are going to set up an online business then should you set up an adult one?

Well I say why not – Sex is one of the most natural things in life and one of the key reasons for life, i.e. pro-recreation. However, sex has and probably will always be a taboo!

So how can you earn money in the adult or porn industry?

There are many alternatives from phone sex sites to pornographic content sites that you could set up yourself – however, there are so many affiliate programs these days that all you need do is to set up an adult website or blog and form links with adult affiliate programs and link your site off to these.

What is interesting about the top porn website listed above, pornhub.com, is that you can view porn for free! So how do they make their money you might ask? One method is that on their site there is a link to a premium service, which includes HD quality and a lot more scenes that people are prepared to pay for.

As pornhub.com is the top site listed for the two main adult searches of “Sex” (215,293 per month) and “Porn” (278,910 per month), which is a total of nearly 500,000 monthly searches on those two search terms alone. To be No.1 on Google for this many searches is like winning the lottery every day!

So to conclude with this article “Sex Sells” for sure, but I am still not sure whether this is the top revenue earner for the Internet.