Front-End Book

I work in an industry where a lot of people try to chase after the big money with small efforts invested, looking for quick cash. Seldom their expectations are met. What brings the cash in is long term dedication towards strict economical, and other measurable, goals. This holds for true with online businesses as well, a lot of people is looking for the big cash-in, either through advertising, affiliation or selling one of its properties. Instead of buying useless “Universal Solutions” for making you a millionaire over night, try to set the correct goals for being a millionaire within 5-10 years instead. Otherwise you will only feel frustrated every single day, when you miss out on your short term goal to become an online millionaire. Of course there will be a YouTube sold to Google every year or so, but I wouldnt put to high expectations on it happening to me. In this article I will think out loud about starting up your own small online business. 

It is not all or nothing

Whenever you end up in a discussion whether or not a solution would fit as an online business and make you money, a lot of people end up saying “That has already been done”, yes of course, but that is not a relly good argument, look at the shelves at your convenient store, there are more than one brand of cereals, right? The good thing with online businesses is that you can choose to target any market you like, even ultra competitive markets can be targeted. With the right online marketing techniques, long term dedication, geographical location and niche you should be able to monetize both short term and long term, but with the possibility to expand geographical location and niche as a long term goal. 

Set up close to realistic goals

Without goals you do not know if your business is running good or bad. You have to have detailed goals; economical, traffic growth, service evolution, budget for online marketing etc etc. It is crucial that you know your market, your future customers and you competitors. By analyzing the competition and competitors offers, you will get better information on how to set up your long term goals. Tools and techniques you can use for evaluation of these things can be:

• Web services such as Alexa.com and Compete.com
• Set up comparative analysis tables for 3-5 competitors to see if there is a niche not yet covered/focused on by competitors.
• Keyword analysis, to find bargain keywords to focus your SEO and PPC efforts on.
• Check with Commission Junction, TradeDoubler and other Affiliate Networks if you can find affiliate programs that easily can be monetized on your online business.
• Try to buy adspace on competitors to get an idea of what they are charging for advertising space.

When you have identified the competitors and economic possibilities, try to set a short term goal and a long term goal. The short term goal must in no way compete with the long term goal. My suggestion is to set up goals that are realistic + 20%, that way you are pushing your self. A typical short term goal could be to say “In three months my business must have 5000 Unique Visitors per month” and a long term goal could be to say “Within 3 years my business should generate enough income for me to pay for my car, phone and apartment”. 

Measure and evaluate

Set up different measure points, that will tell you wether or not you are going in the right direction towards your long term goals. These measure points is often called KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and is used to get a health score on your business. What you need to do is to identify things that can be measured and set a value on those kind of things. A typical example could be:

• A user signup is worth $10
• A new unique visitor is worth $0.05
• Conversion rate vistors-to-users, users-to-buyers, buyers-to-returning-buyers etc.

The value of these different actions is of course an equation based on how you convert your users to paying customers, and by tuning conversion rates, values of different actions may increase in value. Of course you can measure “soft values” as well (design, first impression, brand recognition) but for that you need some kind of interaction with the user through interviews or surveys on a regular basis.

Baby steps is better than no steps at all

By taking the scientific approach to your business, you are going in the right direction, and sooner or later you will start seeing result on your daily income from your online business. It can be very frustrating to see that you only make small number of sales and leads early in your business, but the fact that someone is actually doing something making you money, is an evidence that you have something that works for someone. Now you just have to use all your evaluation tools to identify when it works for who. By doing this, you will increase the chances for earning more money, but it can be a time consuming job, that is why long term is the key. Try to identify what works, and tune that, try to identify what do not work and redo that. But remember: What works short term, may not work long term. Adsense ads all over your website may work for unique new visitors, but I bet you see a high bounce rate and low pageviews/visit.

Do not expect wonders

If you have competition on the business you have chosen to focus on, you will have to fight hard to gain market shares and traffic to your business. Sometimes people find a niche where competition is low and traffic is great, but I do not think it happens too often nowadays. Hard long term work will make it work for you, but do not expect short term miracles when applying a long term strategy to your online business. Sooner or later traffic and earnings will explode if you focus hard. There are no easy ways to success (except luck and exceptional timing)

Conclusion

There are no shortcuts to making huge amounts of money online. But you can gain leverage on your competition by setting up long term goals, KPI:s, evaluate daily, weekly, monthly, tune your product, listen to your users and have faith in your business being a success long term. Avoid setting short term goals that may harm your long term product strategy.

Create Good Content

The best way to increase traffic to your website, is to offer good content or service. If people like what you are offering, they will come back to you and they will link to you. There is no single technique better than this one for generating traffic to your website. How many links do you think wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter or Firefox has? What they have all in common are great content, in different forms.

Search Engine Optimization

If the Search Engines cant find you, you dont exist. If you cant compete with wikipedia, facebook, twitter or firefox for good content, you have to use all the white-hat SEO-techniques you can find in order to optimize your website for search engines. This can be done both on-site and off-site.

Link Exchange

Contact people who run websites or blogs similiar to yours and offer them a link to their site in exchange for a link back to you. This is a good way to start building links organically to your website. When your website is getting more and more popular, more people will contact you with similar offers. Only link to sites that actually has something to do with what you are offering. In order to maximise the search engine optimization, make sure the links you get corresponds to the keywords you are targeting.

Affiliate programs

If you are selling something online. Start an affiliate program and track referrals and give some of your profit to the one who referred the customer to you. If your offer is ok, people will start talking about your affiliate program and start generating traffic to your site, hoping to convert a user and earn a dollar or two. I think more and more people will start using this as a way to drive traffic to their sites. As it is today affiliate programs are mostly used by big players.

Pay Per Click Search Advertising

There are a couple of big solutions today for PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising. The biggest name in the industry is of course Google Adwords. Yahoo and Microsoft also offers solutions for PPC-advertising. With PPC you either target a number of keywords and buy advertising space next to search result, or you buy advertising space on other sites that fits your targeted keywords and website content.

Banner Advertising

A lot of big blogs offers advertising possibilities for banners. Today the most commonly used format for banners on blogs are the square ones you often see above the fold on the right on blogs such as Problogger.net and alikes. The CPM for these type of banners differ a lot but I am sure you can find a good deal for such banner advertising if you look around the blogosphere. You can also post on webmaster forums such as forums.digitalpoint.com where you will find a big and alive community.

Social Networks

Use your contacts to drive traffic to your website. Use both your offline contacts and your online contacts. Typical examples on driving traffic to your site could be the following:

- Mail all your contacts (if they are part of the intended audience) about your website
- Create a Facebook Group that focus on your new website
- Sign up for MyBlogLog.com and promote your website as a commmunity
- Promote your website on MySpace
- Create a short (fun) movie and post it to YouTube.com
- Change your signature on all forums you are active on to include your new website
- Print a t-shirt with your websites url on and wear it to work and when shopping

Competitions and give-aways

Create a simple competition where you hand out a prize or two. The typical prize could be an ipod and a lifetime VIP-membership on your website. If you really want to build traffic, create a competition that acts as a link bait, making the contestants create natural links in forums and such. This is one of the most effective way to get links and traffic. But you have to have somewhere to announce the competition. I would suggest using competitions when you have started to gain an audience.

Link Baits

Link baits are powerful, but sometimes difficult to come up with. It is important to understand the concept. Link baits are content that gets people to link in numbers. A typical example could be someone naming their child Google, a woman throwing up on live TV, a funny letter, a mugshot or just something stupid. You get the picture? Link baits are important but also a question of timing and luck. Typical content that can be considered link baits is:

- Top 10 lists
- Articles with authority that helps people on a matter where there are a lot of interest
- A funny picture, story or movie
- Unique Content such as screenshots from new software or screencaps from upcoming movies
- Something cool or astounding

Link Building

Link building incorporates a lot of different techniques and approaches. This is long-time job and something that builds traffic long-term. But done right it is going to make a huge difference for your traffic. Link building can contain these approaches:

- Article submissions
- Directory submissions
- Social Network submissions
- Commenting on blogs
- Add link to footer in forums you are active in

Buy Traffic

There are a lot of different solutions available out there for buying traffic, from targeted traffic from adwords to people redirecting to your site from domains no longer in use. As you can see the quality of the traffic may differ a lot and you have to take this into account when thinking of buying traffic. But watch out, dont let good offers fool you, a lot of scams exists out there, if someone is selling 10000 unique visitors for $10 it is probably too good to be true.

In order to maximise the profits from the increased traffic, it is important that you know your front end architecture. Front-end architecture covers a vast range of topics within web development, seo and other areas.

I will keep on writing about JavaScript, jQuery if I find material interesting in the future, I may review a book or two in the area. But from now on I will focus on Online Marketing, Affiliate Business, Social Networking, Search Engine Optimization and other areas that explode right now.

And btw, I changed the blogs name to “The Frontend”, still the same URL though.

I bought some adspace today on Facebook Flyers, I believe this will be huge! But I have to wait two days before I make some analysis of the results, but it is much easier to target your audience than with Google Adwords. I will post before saturday with conversion rates/CTR and so on. The pricing starts very low, so it is easy to just try out, I think I have just found a new way to drive traffic!

I believe Facebook will become the no 1 social network before the end of 2007, but there are some things I still miss and I hope they will sort out. If they sort them out, they will please me, grow in signup numbers and earn more cash.

Revenue Sharing on the Facebook Network

One feature that I think will make the number of sign ups and use of Applications explode is the possibility to share revenues within the network. Take the the iLike application for example: The author/programmer of the application is an affiliate for iTunes and makes a small profit each time a Facebook user buys a song from another Facebook user iLike-list. If a User B buys a media item from a list provided by User A, User A should earn a small amount of the profit the application author gets.

Possible solutions on revenue sharing on Facebook

1. Facebook Applications with affiliation and/or subaffiliation between developer and users
2. Get part of ad-earnings from Facebook when visitor to user content clicks an ad if ad presentation is based on content context.
3. Let a user get a smaller amount for adding new active users to their network and earn even more if his/her active users add even more active users.

I believe that this will happen somewhere, users give the social networks a lot of information that the companies can use in order to earn a lot of money, sooner or later the companies must start to share in order to get new customers and good content.