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      "body": "chapter 10 free things you should do:\n\n1) get a google account \n\n2) get a bing account\n\n3) embed the code for google webmaster tools or as it is now called google search console this will let google know about your site and give you tonnes of great data about your site, improvements you can make and errors that your site is throwing up. This lets you submit a sitemap and tell Google of any changes.\n\n4) embed the code for bing webmaster tools same as google webmaster tool but for bing/yahoo loads of data and a route to let bing know what you’re doing\n\n5) embed google analytics code, more data, more ideas on how you can get more traffic, great keyword tools\n\n6) log into google my business and claim your free business listing, this will help your online visibility in local search \n\n7) start your social media outreach work by making accounts with:\n\ngoogle+\nFacebook (list as a business, not a person)\ntwitter\nlinkedin \ninstagram\nyoutube\nvimeo\npintrest\ntumblr\nreddit\nflickr\nvine......

etc social media is an area that trends, new platforms come and go with a hard core of big names that work really hard to stay popular. Decide which ones are relevant to your business and start adding content to them, this will build trust and your pipeline of contacts that know you and what you do. I search on “top social media platforms” once in a while to see what’s new.

If you search on “social media management systems” a selection of platforms will come up that allows you to add all your social media logins to, then you can broadcast over all channels from one point, lightening your load and making your output more effective. \n\nYou can even line up and schedule the release of content to keep signals being transmitted even when you’re on holiday!

8) Search on “local business directories” and add your new business to a select few. By select I mean genuine local directories that people might use OR industry specific directories that help people find specific trades and skills. AVOID automated systems that promised to generate links by adding your website to thousands of directories. As tempting as this sort of thing sounds the links are at best worthless or may harm your search engine results as they count against you.

\n\n9) When the mood takes you write some content on your topic, this can be a blog post for your own site, a piece for another blog or site owner that they might publish in exchange for a link or a swap out for existing content on your site to keep things fresh. The engines like and value activity.\n\n10) Link up with the SEO press, I follow Search Engine Journal, Google Small Business and Search Engine Land. They can conspire to make the SEO game seem super complicated, it is of course not, the pillars are simple a quality well optimised website with quality back links and quality social media output. Easy eh?!?",
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      "body": "Chapter 9 Multiple Channels\n\nIf you go into the sale of physical goods through e-commerce then it makes sense to opt for a platform that can mesh with third party sales platforms like eBay and amazon. This allows your new business venture to get exposure and start making sales from day one. Even if your main site is new and not ranking yet, you can make sales easily and make people aware of your new venture. 

\n\nThe power of amazon and eBay are profound but they come at a cost, they both take a hefty percentage of the sale and do so net of VAT. So make sure when pricing things that you are still making a margin or it is all somewhat pointless! 

It is very quick and easy to list products and you can even float a higher price on these channels as their popularity and level of trust with consumers allows for that. It is also a great way to test the appeal of new products with minimal effort. \n\neBay also tells you what is trending if you need a few ideas.\n\nIf you give the same name to your eBay or amazon store as your business it can strengthen your brand but be aware, competition can be really stiff here with directly comparable alternatives being suggested by the platform itself. On the plus side if you build up a catalogue of great reviews on a product that really helps your reputation and I can say from experience that people are really keen to share both the good and the bad news on something!

\n\nA good e-commerce platform will have the ability to feed images and descriptions directly to third party websites like eBay. This will produce a professional looking product page and generate invoices and accounting information in your back office system. E-commerce is competitive, with time meaning money and the ability to compete when margins get tight, make sure all your systems are as streamlined and easy as possible. 

You can subcontract the design of your eBay store on a freelancing site to get a professional look there too. Good design and presentation is a classic upfront investment, the payoff comes later and is of course very hard to measure but if you make the effort your future customers will appreciate it by giving you business. \n\nPoor presentation and low quality text are something that I continually see, it always turns me off. If you want your business to grow, invest in all aspects of it. Get slack or lazy and someone will be waiting to take your place. \n\nA slight concern with multi channel sales is data sharing, when you use another website you can bet they are gathering data on your activities and finding out what is working well for you. This can leave you vulnerable to more competition from the platform itself as well as other sellers. Stay nimble and keep a close eye on sales data as well as new opportunities to stay ahead of the game. \n\nSome channels offer to run your fulfilment for you too, this means putting your stock in their hands which I find quite alarming as it is then very simple to trace the supply chain back and source the product. \n\nThere are separate professional fulfilment warehouses you can use when you start up that will store your stock, then pick, pack and despatch orders for you for reasonable fee. This is a great tool for the e-commerce start up as storage costs are flexible and there are no nasty long leases to sign into. If you sign a three year lease on a commercial property you can bet within a year or so it will be either too big or too small as the speed of change drives your needs.",
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      "body": "Chapter 8\n\nPaying for traffic, visitors and sales.\n\nOK so you have launched your SEO friendly new site and you are rolling out a comprehensive search engine optimisation programme while uploading videos, hammering your Facebook business page, while tweeting and instagraming with the best of them! What else can you do?\n\nYou can of course start paying per click, floating adverts all over the internet using things like adwords, shopping feeds and paid social media campaigns. None of these are free which is why I emphasise the joy to be found in building a site that gets loads of free visitors by being search engine friendly, but nonetheless well run paid advertising campaigns can be very successful and add great value.

\n\nAdwords \n\nGoogle adwords and other CPC (cost per click) platforms are now so involved it is almost a skill set in itself, however it is a skill set worth having as your ads can be set up very specifically on brands, keywords, negative keywords that filter out broader definitions, dynamic re-advertising which are the adverts that chase you round the internet after you have visited a site and your merchant centre feed that allows your products to show up in the google shopping results. Adwords are easy to set up but harder to master, you may want to approach an adwords professional who can help you fine tune your effort BUT proceed with caution, some charge a percentage of monthly spend so there is a conflict of interests there. Others charge a fixed fee which may be more transparent. Nothing is as good or as cost effective as mastering the skills yourself.\n\nFacebook and other social media adverts\n\nFacebook offers an amazing platform to reach people with offers, deals or just plain subscriber-ship, again if you are a talented writer, marketer and film maker Facebook and other social media outlets will work for you organically. However you can hit a fast forward button and pay for attention. Facebook in particular allow you to hit very specific demographics including obvious ones like age and location and more powerful ones like matching up their listed interests with your products, services or offer. \n\nThe mistake I see regularly on Facebook is a business page set up as a person. This limits the subscriber base to 5000 which is surprisingly easy to reach with some work. You must set your business or group up on Facebook properly or you’ll get to a few thousand subscribers hit the limit then have to start again. Not good. The internet is full of easy to make errors that take a lot of undoing when it’s arguably too late. Be careful! \n\n

You can use Facebook and similar platforms in several ways, you can dish out your knowledge through links to your article, blog posts and videos which keeps people in touch with what you’re doing. \n\nThen you can make enticing offers for people to take advantage of once they have got to know your business. This is an incredibly effective selling tool as you can either set your offers to reach the audience you have built who already know you (this is free) OR you can target new people guided by the likes and interests they have put into Facebook already. It is this level of targeting that makes Facebook such a success as it puts businesses in control of who they advertise to. Gone are the days when you advertised by reaching out to the public through a magazine or newspaper hoping to reach the percentage who are interested in what you do. \n\nThe hard part with social media is momentum, in the early days you’ll be pumping out your best content, trying to find traction and your readers, but keep quality levels high and keep going, social media works like a huge concrete ball, it is hard to get going and everyone is pumping out content continuously so you can feel drowned out. BUT if you keep going, your audience will find you and the likes and shares will start happening, then your efforts will take on a life of their own. With global reach there really is an audience for anyone who cares to share.

\n\nIf you are not a talented graphic designer, make your social media output professional by tapping into freelancers sites like People Per Hour, Fiver, upwork and freelancer. Or of course just pop “hire a freelancer” into a search engine. Find someone you like and build a relationship with them. Whatever your perceived weak spots or strengths are, you can plug the gap with a freelancer and enjoy the benefits of top presentation, this is very important when you consider paid advertising campaigns, if you are paying for clicks, make sure your presentation is top notch.\n\n

Twitter now allows you to pay for advertising too, though I would advise being original and inventive with your social media output to try and get social media to work for you for free. If you have a special offer or some stock you need to sell quickly though an enticing offer boosted out to a paid audience is a great way to get things done.\n\nThere are great phone apps to jazz up your social media output too like phoster, a simple app that makes it easy to turn an image into an attractive poster or meme. Just search on meme generator and loads of easy to use apps come up and who knows you could have a viral hit meme on your hands with all the free exposure that comes with it!
\n\nMy favourite social media marketing tool is video, nothing has more power than a video so with a little effort and a facebook “boost” you can reach a whole new audience with some really compelling content and a link back to your site of course!",
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      "body": "Thank you. I’m enjoying reading about your expertise. I’m building a technical company, which needs a lot of interaction with customers for sales. But I did enjoy learning more about how to get visibility on the internet with a company.",
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      "body": "Chapter 7 SEO on your pages

\n\nIf you have done some homework on the internet you will have heard the phrase “content is King” and this is very true. It keeps the humans flicking through your website and it tells the search engines what your site is about, how to rank it and of what quality it is. Here are my tips for writing good pages.\n\nThe meta data: Any website building software or content management system will give you full control over page title, description and probably keywords too. The relevance of keywords has faded in recent times so don’t worry about them too much. Google made it known some time ago that it ignores keywords. Page title and description are important and give you a great chance to tell the search engines all about the page. 
\n\nKeep the page title short and to the point with a maximum of 70 characters, if it is a product get the brand, model and type in there so the page will work for people searching specifically for that product. For example “5 litre Optimal duck egg blue kitchen and bathroom paint”

If it is a blog post offering a “how to strip your Border Terrier’s coat” guide then call it that. Be descriptive and use good english, do not attempt to disjoint the sentence to stuff an extra juicy keyword in there. The engines can detect wobbly grammar.\n\nThe description allows for more text, up to 140 characters is recommended so add a product specific like the material, category of product or what the product is known for. For example\n\n“5 litre can of Optimal kitchen and bathroom paint in duck egg blue, a leading waterproof coating”\n\nFor the blog post example try this sort of description “The best way of stripping your border terrier or other wiry haired small dog’s coat and the stripping combs and tools we recommend”\n\nThis will net more traffic as it expand search terms to include “wiry haired dogs” and “recommended stripping combs” 

If you need help with your title or description then use the google keyword checker tool within adwords, this will make suggestions and tell you which keywords get the traffic. Use it, it is quite surprising where the search traffic is!\n\nOn page text or copy is also read by the search engines as long as it is not trapped in a frame! On setting up a new website make sure you don’t trip over this most elementary website disaster, no frames!
\n\nKeep the text natural and relevant, you can use a keyword density checker online to avoid being penalised for accidental keyword stuffing (current thinking is no more that 2.5% of the same word or phrase on a page to avoid looking like purposeful keyword manipulation). Be descriptive and tell all you can about the product, service or information you are sharing. \n\nRemember you are writing for human readers not machines so make it friendly, original and don’t be afraid of being jovial. 

When I am writing copy for the web I make sure it is authentic, I’m not a salesman and I don’t think people really enjoy being sold to anyway. Long term it is better to be accurate, informative and genuine. This builds trust and manages expectation. Also remember that you are writing for someone who probably knows nothing about the subject matter, so start with the basics and work up. \n\nTest your written content on friends and family who are separate from your business, ask them their opinion on the piece and if it was useful and informative. Invest time in this stage as once your content is published it may be a while before it is refreshed.

Blog posts can be even more friendly and casual as you are really talking to your audience with blogging, sharing your expertise and offering help and advice. \n\nMy blogging is chatty and informal, easy to read and friendly. I find publishing helpful blog posts one of the most rewarding types of content marketing as blogs are there to help and inspire as well as draw traffic and social engagement. Remember there are people out there who know nothing about your skill set so this is your chance to help them. People search the internet for the help they need, you can be that help and you’ll be appreciated for putting you answers out there. \n\nRich snippets, schema and micro data\n\n At the time of writing this rich snippets, schema and micro data are still relatively new. They are however all designed to improve search engine results and are easy enough to implement. If you run a wordpress blog you will already be familiar with adding rich snippets. This simply allows you to add a page type be it an article, product review, recipe, etc. From there a set of drop down boxes will appear that you can then fill in with nice specific data that helps the search engines deliver good results (which is what they are all about). \n\nThis is why when you select a platform or a web design company you need a supplier that is currently up to date AND more importantly has a good track record on adopting new web technologies as they arrive. Don’t let your website gather dust.
\n\nschema.org is a set of protocols the leading search engines agreed on as a way of presenting micro data in a uniform manner that would benefit search engines and publishers alike. If you search on “schema creator” you will find help creating your schema data and guides on adding it to the suitable pages of your site. I have found web publishing immensely enjoyable and rewarding but you must stay current to get the best results.

 \n\nIf you get involved with a web designer that insists on hosting your website (usually with shaky reasoning involving unique server technology or other such twaddle) you are entering into a marriage of sorts that can be hard to leave. If the design firm get lazy with updating their platform your once gleaming website can slip into obscurity through not keeping pace with new technologies as they emerge. I have experienced this with a web company continually taking the “it doesn’t matter line” when of course the major search engines value websites that keep up! If your website is slipping in the search engine results pages, not adopting new technologies could be a factor.\n\nYour platform being up to date is one of the most obvious SEO “easy wins” out there and it is really a no-brainer, this is why I would recommend a web design firm that uses an open source e-commerce platform like magento that has updates released continuously rather than their own white label platform that they may be reluctant to improve. \n\nAgain my aim here is to highlight these risky, high impact areas before you take the plunge as making a U turn is expensive and time consuming once all the effort has gone in. 

Each page should be a technical and contextual strength to the website it is part of, don’t be afraid to delete old content as obsolete pages will make your website look like a shop with dusty old goods on the shelf. \n\nThey are there, but no one is interested in them and they drag the place down.",
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      "body": "I am intrigued to know which internet companies you build.",
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      "body": "Chapter 6 Search Engine Optimisation, not all links are the same\n\nSEO is a subject that deserves a book or two all by itself. The old days are over and the popular search engines really do a good job of seeking out the websites out there that are genuine authorities on their subjects. Or in the case of Wikipedia, authorities on pretty much any topic you can think of. 

This is why we recommend choosing your specialisation and URL wisely, that is the first stage to creeping up the search engine rankings and becoming noticed by web surfers trying to find your products or services. \n\nOn-topic content that search engines can read will help, so in the early days of launching your website keep adding content, keep blogging and keep circulating your stuff round social media. Keep the content natural and avoid keyword stuffing (overusing your key search terms in a bid to aid SEO) as this will be obvious to the word counters within the search engines and your efforts will be penalised. 

Avoid content voids, pages that are mainly images with minimal text will look bad in the eyes of the search engines, they won’t know what the page is about and will take a dim view. Although the web is now really about video and pictures for human eyes, text is important for the search engines to know what they are looking at.\n\nThe next vital ingredient in your site working it’s way up the search engine results pages are LINKS. High quality links are the holy grail of SEO. Gone are the days when you could circulate content on article sharing sites in exchange for a link back to your site, the engines are wise to this practise and a lot of article sites only offer “no follow” links (a link with code that stops the engines from following the link) 
\n\nSo you need to invest serious time and effort into working with other site owners and bloggers to gain link to YOUR site from other HUMAN OWNED and EDITED sites. This is a time consuming practise but ONE decent link from an independently owned and ranked site is worth 200 links from junk sources. You will need to be patient but trust me, if you can add 10 links a month from bloggers and website owners who will swap you a link for some original content then your site will steadily march up the rankings. \n\nWhen you start don’t waste time hitting up big name sites for a link, work with hobbyists, bloggers, influencers and web site owner / operators who will understand where you are at. This is called blogger outreach and it works. The deal is simple, find websites that have a level of synergy with yours then use the contact us page to write a nice email along the lines of:\n\nHi ******** \n\nI found your site on google last night and really like the work you have done, we run www.door-knobs-online.co.uk and are passionate about all things to do with architecture and self building homes. Could we write you an original piece on selecting high security doors and windows for your self build home or another construction topic of your choosing in exchange for a link back to our website? Let me know and I promise you that the piece will be original and unique to your site.\n\nKind regards\n\nMark\n\n

This sort of approach will let the webmaster know that you are serious and understand the need to keep content original and unique to the site it is part of. \n\nPLEASE don’t fall for all the cheap link building services out there promising that they will blast your content to over 300 link sharing sites while “spinning” the content to be original each time guaranteeing you high quality google friendly links each time!! It’s not 2005 any more and this just will not work. \n\nMore than likely nothing will happen OR worse still your ranking level will drop. With link building, add your site to a few industry specific directories, share some infographics then stick to building quality links. If your content is really good, the people will link to it of their own accord too, this is the ultimate approval of your work, someone saying “click on this and check out what I’ve just found” and that is why search engines like sites that other sites link to. \n\nIn webmaster tools you can keep tabs on sites that link to you, as this number creeps up, so will the perceived authority of your website. It must be said that every other website owner will be doing this too, so normal business rules apply, don’t throttle off or the others will catch up. \n\n
You can see how your competition is doing by running their url through a back link checker (just search on back link checker) this will let you know how many links they have but not the quality of those links. If you stick to quality link building and your site is optimised in the other ways I have covered you can catch up and out rank your competition with a few months of solid effort. Less if the search terms are not that competitive. \n\nAnchor text, this is a chunk phrase for a simple thing, a simple link is looks like this (the bold text forms the link) :

go check out https://www.door-knobs-online.co.uk \n\nThis will link back to your home page AND has your search terms neatly in (one of the reasons good url choice is important) \n\nA more complicated link involving a little code is this\n\nGo check out door knobs online I just bought a great front door knocker from them\n\nNow this type of link looks neater and will be more common as bloggers and webmasters care about presentation. Using a simple piece of html code any text can become a link out to another site. This is called anchor text is simply the chunk of text that people can click on. 

Internal links:\n\nThese only require you to cooperate with yourself, make sure your pages link to each other using natural anchor text that describes the page the link is heading to. This will help the engines crawl your site and to know what it is about. We relaunched one of our sites onto a new platform losing a lot of internal links in the process. The homepage hung onto it’s ranking well, while every internal page dropped away in the SERPs cutting our organic traffic in half! \n\nWe spotted the problem quickly and recovered the situation by adding internal links from one page to another. \n\nBit of a scare but everything can be fixed if you know what you’re looking for!
\n\nSo link from your blog posts to your other blog posts and into your main site and from page to page and department to department, this will help readers and search engine crawlers navigate round your site. You can steer your own internal linking to focus your SEO project towards certain products or departments that make the most commercial sense to you. For example if you have a retail website that stocks a lot low margin products that pad it out while a few core products you import direct you can funnel links towards these higher margin products by making your internal links point to them. This will also help make the website rank well for these specific products too.\n\n
Building a search engine friendly website is time consuming, the purpose of this guide it to help you use your time well and not waste it. Quality link building is time well spent. 

A quick word here on my experiences with the SEO industry, over the years I have paid various monthly retainers to various marketing companies with surprisingly consistent results. All except one small three person firm delivered disappointing results, sometimes even losing ranking on the site they were working on. Let me tell here why I think that happens. \n\nA lot of time consuming fiddling goes on which will just not effect much at all, secondly link building is hard and time consuming and it seems that most SEO companies just aren’t very good at it yet. \n\nEither they are slow to catch on or they think there is an easier way. 

For me, the ideal SEO company would have a network of privateer blog owners on their books so they could easily add quality links to any new site they were working on, driving that site up the rankings. Instead they tend to talk big and deliver small. We tasked one small SEO firm to build links only and our site marched up the SERPs very reliably. \n\nBE CAREFUL with SEO firms as they usually tie you in for 6 months or more, it can be very frustrating and expensive, imagine paying money out while you watch your website fall down the rankings.

This goes back to you being the expert in your field, if you write a blog post on your profession it will be insightful and up to date. If a writer within an SEO firm pens a blog post on your behalf it may be the first time they’ve ever even thought about your specialisation. Its stands to reason that your blog post will be better and won’t take you long to write either. \n\nIn defence of SEO companies it is a tricky industry to be involved in because the goalposts shift all the time and customer expectation is high that results will come quickly. The key with SEO is to know what you are doing, invest your time wisely and be patient. The results will come. 

The real pay off on the internet is if your content is really compelling like the electric car company Tesla or the current King of Youtube Casey Neistat no SEO is required, people will just naturally link to and share your stuff. \n\nIf you think about your content like that, and make genuinely stunning content then the SEO load can be lightened. Obviously building a 600HP electric car from scratch then housing it all in a giga-factory is all pretty interesting stuff, but you know what I mean, be cool, be funny, be original and the secret sauce of the internet will work for you!\n\nLink on my fine friends, and remember this one high quality link is worth 300 nonsense ones.",
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      "body": "Chapter 5 Launching micro sites, blogs and videos\n\nIf you have a flagship product, category or brand that people are looking for then by name, then launch a micro site, blog and videos to draw more traffic and sales. Websites are cheap and easy to publish, I found great success putting up simple 5 or 6 page html product specific micro sites for hot products that simply used the product name as their url. The sites instantly ranked top 10 in the SERPs for that product and continually generated sales through a simple “buy it here” link back to the main e-commerce enabled retail site. A simple investment that can pay you back over and over again. Micro sites add gravity to you as a retailer of the product too and if you are the manufacturer, importer or distributor, you simply need to have a individual site dedicated to that product. It is a great way of listing stockists you may have too, a link out to their websites will be appreciated on a “where to buy” or “stockists” page. \n\nI would then film product specific youtube videos using the product name and brand in the title and description of the video. As simple as it sounds and free to host on youtube and other video sharing types. Do not forget that people research products and ways of doing things on video sharing sites. If you make a video on furniture refurbishment or the best way to free off a rusted hinge, you will get views. Also well made “liked” videos feature in conventional SERP’s too as likes, shares and views are counted by the more popular search engines. If you get creative you may well have a viral video on your hands too, which simply means people share the content with their social circles and more people learn about your business and services for FREE! \n\nRemember each video you share will have a text section in which you can use to link back to specific pages on your website for people looking to learn more or buy!\n\nI like to log into my youtube creator studio to see the videos I made years ago still getting shared, liked and viewed. You can equip yourself with an HD or even 4K camera very economically get hold of some LED lights and film your own content easily. Apple products come with Imovie, learning to edit video takes an afternoon and of course there are loads of helpful videos on you’ve guessed it, video sharing sites like youtube. 

\n\nThe better you get at videos the more attractive they will be and you may want to graduate to more advanced video editing software like final cut pro. This give more functions than Imovie and the results can be spectacular. 

I also embed the product videos I make on the product pages of my e-commerce sites as this gives potential customers a great product tour which generates sales and helps avoid returns as people are making fully informed choices. Video talks, quite literally.\n\n
Blogging is vital, well written blogs are shared on social media which is free advertising and has SEO benefits too as a blog post is seen by the search engines as fresh content showing your site is being worked on and is current. You can tailor a blog post round a high traffic search phrase like “how to start a juice bar” and grab more high quality traffic. You can then shoot an informative video and embed it in the post which people appreciate and can be as simple as you presenting the blog post text with little else going on. \n\nIn the internet age people appreciate sincerely shared expertise, this isn’t salesmanship it is a way of helping answer questions with your content that has the welcome side effect of building trust in your business and you as an expert.\n\nThis is easy to overlook too, but I guarantee you this, when you have a full time job that you’re immersed in for ten hours a day, you are an expert full of specific knowledge. It all seems pedestrian and hum drum to you, but get your expertise out there, there are people looking for it right now. When I was young you had to ask a person or look things up in an encyclopaedia, now you search the net. Quality, up to date information is at everyone’s fingertips and you can add your bit. \n\nYou are part of the global brain, share it!!

\n\nThere is a tendency to look at the vastness of a site like youtube or the internet itself and think adding to it is pointless, but prepare to be surprised, if you put some effort in, your videos and blog posts will accumulate views and help your business. Never before have we had such a direct link between reader and author! 
\n\nGive your videos every chance by putting effort into their names and descriptions so for example if I ran a juicer company I could shoot a video named \n\n“The best way to clean your cold press juicer”

 This would attract traffic on search phrases like “best way to clean a juicer” “how do I clean my cold press juicer” 

Then, in the video’s description, repeat the key search phrases but re-structure them to scoop more targeted traffic, for example:\n\n 
“In this video we give hints and tips of the best ways to clean your vertical cold press juicer showing neat ways to make sure your juicer is as clean as possible before dismantling. We then looking at cleaning each of the juicer’s components including the tricky juicing screen and squeezing screw or auger. We share our best ideas on cleaning juicing machines and the best tools and detergents to use in juice extractor clean up” \n\nDo you see what I have tried to do there? In the description I have attempted to gain more traffic by adding subtle variations on the most obvious (or high traffic) search terms.\n\nSo “juicer” was expanded to include “juicing machine” and “juice extractor”
I added “hints and tips” and “best ideas” to “best way” and mentioned some common juicer components to try and scoop additional traffic by those searching things like “best way to clean my juicer’s screen” 

Then finally add your links to the bottom of the description so viewers can find your website, social media channels, blogpost or what ever else you want to send them to. \n\nThis is the way that the internet can offer a cohesive marketing strategy that sends leads directly to your main site or social media channels so people can stay in touch with and get to know you and your business.",
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      "body": "chapter 4 making data based decisions from the start \n\nThere is no need to guess at things any more, there is so much high quality free information available that you can go straight to the source to further fine tune your efforts. Before you do anything else, here are a few tools to link up with, all you need is a email address and you can start.\n\ngoogle webmaster tools\ngoogle adwords keyword planner\nbing webmaster tools\ngoogle analytics\n\nIn the start up phase it is incredibly useful to put your most obvious high money search terms into the google adwords keywords planner, this amazing tool will then give you estimated monthly searches for that search word or term THEN make suggestions for alternatives. This has been a really powerful tool for me, directing me towards high traffic, low competition search terms that would never occurred to me without this tool. For example when researching a website for a friend who runs a hair salon I was surprised to see that “hairdresser” and “hairdresser online” generated more traffic than “hair salon” with a local business like hair dressing it is then easy to combine the search terms with the locality to pull in high-quality business-generating traffic.\n\nFinding out where the traffic is and also what the competition is like for certain keywords and phrases then helps you write more relevant blog posts, launch more effective micro sites and shoot more effective youtube videos. More on all of these later. \n\nModern accounting packages have good inventory control and reporting functions, this allows you to monitor what is selling well and what is fading. This data can prevent you from tying up precious cash in unpopular or worse still obsolete stock. E-commerce is fiercely competitive and you ignore this data at your peril. 

You may love a particular item but if the market says otherwise do not ignore the facts. Successful businesses have to continually ‘get it right’ in a changing world, it is very easy to get on the wrong side of this by making emotional rather than calculated moves. Generate, farm and take note of the data. This really helps you stay on top of trends and keep growing. Trends can of course be seasonal, but an underlying down trend in a certain product or market area must not be ignored.\n\nHigh quality data driven decisions also take the stress out of planning, it is a great feeling to have confidence in your business planning because you have done your homework and taken the guesswork out of it.

Excel is still king of the numbers for me, I can keep monthly tallies of product sales and set prices and order stock  accordingly, in e-commerce things must flow or stock can get stuck and grind to a halt completely. \n\nYou must see this happening and get things moving again with sales and offers or precious storage space can become clogged up with slow moving items. The thing about a monthly sales excel sheet is that you can see trends taking shape in front of your eyes. Stay nimble, no flab, this is business, customer demands will be met by someone else if you do not stay on top of them.",
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      "body": "Chapter 3 choose your platform\n\nThis has been one of the most astonishing and concerning areas of website building, don’t take anything for granted when talking to web design firms and don’t be afraid to ask what may seem like really basic questions.\n\nFor a website to be truly effective all aspects must be optimised towards search engine performance or you will be facing an uphill struggle to get noticed. Trust me when I say that achieving and maintaining good search engine positions will take a good proportion of your time, don’t pull the rug out from under yourself by building a site that will be a battle to optimise. \n\nSEO orientated questions to ask your web designer if you use an e-commerce platform or other type of content management system.\n\nCan alt tags be individually edited (Alt tags describe each image and are important for search engines to identify the image and for people with impaired sight to access your website) we fell foul of expensive systems without this basic function.\n\nCan you access the full suite of page meta data to edit it for SEO purposes, this means page title, description and keywords.  Although keywords are less relevant these days as some search engines ignore them. But it still indicates the level of customisation or control that you will have over your site. Some C.M.S. platforms will generate page title and description for you which can be hit and miss depending on where it draws the information from.\n\nCan you add and edit H1, H2, H3 and H4 content. With most platforms this is easy, in the HTML editor area that allows you to add text there will be the ability to turn normal text into H1, 2, 3, 4 headers. This can be descriptive and give the search engines more idea of what your webpage it about. Remember you want your homepage to rank for your area of specialisation your internal pages get you even more high quality traffic by ranking for your specific products or services. If some one is looking for a ‘chrome plated round drawer handle” it will be useful if your page or department filled with chrome plated round drawer handles pops up first on a search engine.\n\nIs there the ability to add “rich snippets” to the page, rich snippets are another way of giving search engines nice descriptive information about the specific webpage. This again adds to your SEO efforts and needs to be edited by you, rather than generated by the platform (this can lead to poorly constructed information) \n\nOpen source blogging platform wordpress has this feature, so why wouldn’t your platform?\n\nDoes your platform create a fully responsive website that will display on mobile, tablet and desktop. This question is vital, more and more search traffic comes through mobile devices and I can’t see that trend changing any time soon. Who knows as hardware gets better the very notion of a desktop PC may well go extinct. The search engines look for sites that have either mobile versions or are fully responsive and will adjust to the screen size they are being viewed on automatically. Your new site needs to do this!\n\n
Will you host the site on a secure server, if you are going into e-commerce, launch the site on a secure server from the start this means your url will start “https” not “http” the engines will read that and prefer your website to non secure competitors as it indicates you take your customer’s security seriously\n\nDo you see that good SEO and website building is a cake of many ingredients!

How neat is the code? Straight forward bad code is a common problem, ask your web site designer or platform supplier for examples of live websites that already use their content management or e-commerce systems. Check the page load speeds by searching on “page load speed checker” and feeding the homepage into the checker. This is a great way of showing who’s sites are well coded and throwing up the fewest errors. \n\nAgain the search engines take this data into account, can you image investing hundreds of hours writing content and buffing images for a CMS that runs slowly and will never please the search engines criteria? 

There are so many ways to hamper your online efforts and doing a U turn on a website that is fundamentally flawed is painful and expensive. I think it probably happens every day though.\n\nWill my website have social media links, two things here, obviously the site’s very template MUST have links out to your businesses Facebook page, instagram, pintrest, youtube, vimeo, twitter and any other social media outlet you plan on using. But will the individual product pages have “like” “tweet” and “share” buttons? Increasingly social media use is part of search engine results if you content is being shared it must be relevant and of interest to people. That is as simple as that. A share is like a vote, “come and have a look at what I found” is what the sharer is saying. Make sharing your content easy to do, this is SEO that will happen while you sleep.\n\nDoes the offering use frames? Old one this, just don’t, frames can lock valuable content away from search engines and leave them staring at a blank space. Make SURE this doesn’t happen to you.\n\nCan I embed video content in a slick and seamless way. Some platforms I have used really didn’t offer this. Videos show and speak to people in a way that text and pictures just cannot. So use video and make sure your platform can serve up video content in a what that does not look like a clumsy after thought.\n\nDoes your platform general a site map file that can be uploaded to the various search engines to update them on the site. This isn’t optional, you need to tell the engines about your site and that is what a site map does.

Does your e-commerce section generate a merchant feed that will allow your products to show up on shopping channels offered by search engines? 

Can your e-commerce platform run eBay, amazon, Tesco, Debenhams and other channels allowing you to simply integrate selling through third party sites as easily and neatly as selling through your own site\n\nWhich accounting software packages will your e-commerce platform link to to save on administration time\n\nIs there an easy way of keeping content fresh, a website is never done and never finished. Content must be kept fresh and new content added continuously, this tells engines that the site is alive and kicking and that someone is taking an interest in it. A blog is the easiest way to add fresh content while internal pages should be checked and updated frequently. Most web designers should be able to install an open source blogging platform like wordpress seamlessly onto your server so adding fresh content is a cinch. \n\nAlso your blogging is a great way of capturing more free traffic with well named and SEO optimised blog posts. People are searching for information on refurbishing old furniture, if they read your post they will feel connected with your business and may come back to buy their new drawer handles from you. Think of blog posts as little advertising billboards floating round the internet bringing high quality traffic to your site.\n\n

Is the platform open source? How do updates happen? Who is going to host the site and where? \n\nSome agencies insist on hosting the site themselves which can lead to a rather turbulent relationship if prices creep up or performance falls down. I had this exact experience of a shiny new website falling further and further behind as the company hosting it would not update their platform and keep up with the times. \n\nIf a web agency is successful you can be drawn to them, then that very success becomes the problem as they get comfortable and don’t press ahead with every possible tweak and update to keep their platform current. Or suddenly every update that would be free on open source software comes with a hefty price tag. In my experience that agency only really took notice when customers started leaving them in droves. But by then it is too late. From that experience I would choose an independent agency on an open source e-commerce platform every time. \n\nPeople change, businesses change, try not to tie yourself to one supplier it is not a safe long term strategy. 

Can you imagine your homepage slipping further and further down the SERPs simply because of out of date code or some other SEO limitation? The internet changes fast and to stay on top you need the flexibility that independence brings.\n
\nWill the template included links to my major brands and department pages, this is a simple way of making sure that your internal link strategy remains healthy. Steer the design towards a template with plenty of room for text. Two reasons here, search engines like text and text means links so each page that the template is on will link to prominent internal pages keep them searchable and easy to find.",
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      "body": "Chapter 2\n\nChoose your topic and your URL\n\nLet’s face facts to make your mark on the internet you either need to be the size of amazon and do it all, or carve out a niche as a specialist supplier gearing everything you do towards surfacing through the background noise of the almost infinite web!\n\nIf you choose your specialisation, you can build authority of yourself as an expert and your site and surrounding social media output and stand a chance of appearing in the search engine results that will feed you traffic and sales. There are several short cuts to getting traffic and making sales that I will share with you later, but long term if you become THE specialist in your niche, you will create value, and that is what it’s all about!\n\nIf your efforts are too generalised you will probably be drowned out in search results as the search engines will simply not recognise your site’s area of expertise. The major search engine’s technology is now so advanced that to feature in SERPs (search engine results pages) your site must be considered a leading authority on the topic it represents. This is not to say you can’t launch multiple websites each with their area of focus, in fact doing just that will make it easier to find quality traffic than one un-focussed website that is hard to understand and pigeon hole.\n\nThe first job to do when setting up a website of any type is to buy the website URL, people do this badly and cause themselves work loads of unbelievable proportions trying to make the site visible. Let me give you an example. 

Let’s say you decide to set up an e-commerce website and your chosen specialisation is drawer and cupboard handles, very specialised quite a niche, this is a good idea, a strong start. Now let’s think about the URL, the address that the site will sit on. If you read the SEO press there are conflicting reports on the importance of what follows, but in my experience and particularly when launching product specific micro sites (more about this later) this part is vital. The typical decision people make is to choose a brand, say “Grosvenor Designer Hardware” then go and buy www.grosvenor-designer-hardware.co.uk or worse still a URL like www.grosvenordesignerhardware.com \n\nThese choices may bolster “brand awareness” (whatever that is) or fly the company flag, but they won’t help people find your site for what it is you offer. When you first start, no one is searching for your company name, people are however, searching for cupboard handles and drawer handles so aim for those search terms when you buy your URL.

It is much better to buy a functional url that will drive traffic based on the search terms you need to be found for so think more along the lines of:\n\nwww.drawer-and-cupboard-handles.co.uk\nwww.drawer-and-cupboard-handles-online.co.uk\nwww.quality-handles-for-cupboards.com\nwww.best-drawer-handles.co.uk\n\nAlthough these URLs seem clunky or not very catchy they will help your SEO efforts no end. I have got some URLs right and some wrong over the years and I know which sites have hit rankings, traffic and sales. By having search keywords in your URL you achieve two things, the obvious one is search engines scanning those money generating search terms in the top line of your website, the URL or web address. And two, people linking back to your site may use anchor text OR they’ll just use your URL. Tune your URL choice for traffic generation. Traffic is profit.\n\nBuying the URL is the FIRST thing you do, get it wrong and at best you’ll triple the amount of time you spend on your SEO (search engine optimisation) efforts, at worst your business will fail. It is THAT important and it takes 2 minutes. Great if you know, positively chilling if you don’t.\n\nSurf the net and search for some products, say guitar strings you’ll see amazon, eBay, expensive adword listings, all the big hitters, then specialised sites probably with “guitar” and “strings” in their URL. Wise choice of URL follow that model.\n\nThis is also why some web real estate is so valuable, like www.skateboards.com for example. The buying and selling of prime addresses happens like attractive number plates for cars. Another topic in itself.",
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      "body": "Let me tell you a bit about me, I’ve spent the last 10 years involved in e-commerce, in this time I’ve turned over £100k in one month, £650k in one year, bought two houses and completely transformed my life. In 2005 Haringey Council paid my rent for 6 months while I started my first e-commerce business, which I started with a £12000 car loan. \n\nI started knowing very little about the internet, previously I sweated it out fitting boat equipment for 10 years. I’ve learned much of what is in this book by trial and error, and hope by reading this you can streamline your own efforts and avoid some of the pitfalls and setbacks I have had. \n\nI know effect full time work for low wages can have on people and I’d like to help you use the internet and e-commerce to change your life for the better too.\n\nIs it easy or risk free? no but if I can do it, so can you, and better still you can turn your interests and passions into profitable businesses with flexible working hours allowing you to live life more on your terms. \n\nIf that sounds like something you would like to do, read on, I’ll tell you everything I know.",
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