Where new business ideas come from

Hi. I have been thinking about starting a new internet business lately and I think I have come up with a new idea. I wanted to share with you my thought process so that you could see that a new business can come from anywhere.

When I got married in 1993 (15 years already!) I wrote a wedding planner. I sold about 300 copies over the next few years on my own and then it sat on a shelf. I thought perhaps I could sell it on the net.

So, I went to wordtracker (1st step) to see if there was a need for a wedding planner without a lot of competition. I found that there are TONS of wedding planners out there and too much competition to start a new business. So, was I discouraged? No!

Next, I searched all kinds of keywords related to weddings and planning weddings, etc. I found that quite a few people are searching for do it yourself wedding invitations. Now, I love desktop publishing and I actually teach Word to college students, so I know quite a bit about designing documents, merging addresses, etc.

So, now comes the business idea. What about a site that gives away a customizable free wedding invitation that you make yourself? If you want others, you can preview them but then you buy them? Or a manual on how to design and create one with templates included. My bonus item will be my wedding planner! Perfect. I registered the domain "do-it-yourself-wedding-invitations.com and now I am all set. I will be busy for the summer, but development for my new business will start in August or Sept. I am super excited!

So, now you see how something from our past, or a hobby or even a job can turn into a business. What I thought would be my product turned out to be my bonus, but my work skills will help me create a sough-after product in no time!

Good luck finding your next business!

Barb

HTML eBook

Hi. I wanted to give you a link to a free ebook on HTML for web pages:

Instructions for Developing Web Pages Ulitizing HTML

I am getting certified as a web developer and I recently took an HTML course. I really enjoyed it and I found that it really helped me with my web sites. I use Frontpage, however, I can now go into the code and fix errors that I find. Also, when I am posting my articles on article directory sites, I can easily add numbered and unordered lists and bolding, etc. to my articles. I'm sure there are many other things I know now that I didn't know last year, but off the top of my head these are the first 2. All things considered, web pages are MUCH easier for me now than they used to be - plus they look a whole lot better now! Check out the HTML ebook and see if it helps you too.

Barb

Search Engine Optimization

I've been taking a look at my previous posts and I realize that I haven't spent a lot of time talking about search engine optimization of SEO.

SEO is important beceause it doesn't matter how nice your website is or how great your product is, if no one can find it, you won't sell anything. It's like having a million dollar store in Cape Dorset, Canada (small population). The majority of the public won't have access to your store, so you will only sell to the population of Cape Dorset and not the general public.

So how do you get lots of traffic to your site? There are some "black hat" techniques that I would NOT recommend. These would include "stuffing" your site with a million copies of your keywords in very small print. This type of action could cause you to get "black listed" by the search engines. That would be very bad!

Good and legal way to get traffic are out there and should be utilized. What you want is to "optimize" the pages of your website so that when a potential customer keys in certain words into the search engine, your site comes up in the first page or two of results. Of course, first you need to know what your keywords are (what words people are keying into the search engines). You can do this through Wordtracker and I have an earlier post all about Wordtracker.

I had an interesting experience with SEO a few months ago. I do some contract work for a company that was not getting a lot of traffic. So I decided to see what I could do. I researched on Wordtracker and found a few keyword phrases that I could target. Here's what I did:

1. add keywords to title tags for each page in a sentence that showed a feature of service of company;
2. add keywords to meta tags;
3. add keywords to meta description, including a sentence that showed benefits of using our company;
4. add keywords where they would occur naturally in the content of the website;
5. post articles to website as well as article directories that include keywords in the title and the body of the article;

After doing the above (I spent probably a total of 10 hours doing the above), we went from not in the top 300 searches to #3 for one keyword and 19 for another. That was only after writing 3 articles, so there is still a lot I can do, but this was a promising start. Already, the traffic is increasing.

So, try using the above techniques. I will give you other techniques later, but this is a good start.

Barb

Interested in a free ebook on eBay?

Hi. I found a free ebook on becoming successful on eBay, "The Guide to Cashing in on eBay". Here is the link:

http://www.free-ebooks.net/files/861Guide%20To%20Cashing%20In%20On%20Ebay.pdf

If you haven't started your interest business yet and want to see if you can make a quick buck selling some stuff you don't want anymore, or if you are just curious about how to make money on eBay, check out this free ebook and you could start an ebay business. You just may find another stream of income. When I started my online business, my goal was to have 5 businesses that each made $10,000.00 a year. You could start with the same goal too - this just may be one of them! Good luck!

Barb

I'm finally back - and with another free business ebook!

Hi. Well, sorry for the long break. I've been finalizing the research for an annually updated industry directory that my company publishes each year for law firms. I hope you've been busy developing your niche market and creating an awesome website.

In keeping with the purpose of this blog, here is another free ebook I've just posted on another one of my websites - The Expert Guide to Affiliate Marketing. It will help you explore your options with selling affiliate products, just in case you haven't already tried that option on your website yet, or if you are just starting out and don't have a product yet.

Good luck! Talk to you soon.

Barb