Day 35: StomperNet – The Sinkhole & The 5 Steps to Internet Income

November 21, 2009 · Posted in 90 Days of StomperNet

The desk and tack-board that got cleared yesterday is starting to pile up with clutter again. Ideas were drawn up, sifted through then stompernet-review-sinkhole kept or discarded depending on how they fit with all the other parts. I more or less ended the designing session with the excitement every entrepreneur has when they think they have it. I only spent a couple of hours for this. Then immediately buckled down to work on what I could do myself or contact people who can help out with the parts I am having difficulty with.

A couple of hours is okay. Past experience has taught me how vulnerable I am to falling into an analysis by paralysis sinkhole. So it was more important to me to get some tangible work done today versus getting what I think will work on paper. A gamble? Yes. But I’ll take this gamble today already knowing what all this will amount to if I don’t take the gamble – Nothing!

Deciding and actually getting started did wonders. I find myself wanting to get back on my laptop and work whenever I have some pressing errand to do. So it looks like I’ve safely navigated myself around that sinkhole. I’ll post updates on the product work in the next few days. So far, everything is green for the Monday deadline.

I attended a couple of Webinars on SEO yesterday.

First, there was the seminar by SEO Braintrust headed by Leslie Rohde and Dan Theis. They have a very funny setup. One of them calls himself the Left Brain and the other calls himself the Right Brain. Funny… even geeky. But make no mistake. These guys know their stuff and is one of the strengths of StomperNet. Google would re-adjust how they rank websites or do what people in the Internet Marketing Industry call as Google slaps. This basically means that you sleep with a page-1 ranking today but wake up on page-nowhere tomorrow. Whenever Google does this, all the efforts and planning you did before might not work suddenly. So who figures out how the new way works? It’s Dan and Leslie. Do they just do it by reading and analyzing? No, they would do the reading and the analyzing, but on top of that, they will quickly do the live testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Then quickly share this information to people who register for their SEO Braintrust program or to Brad Fallon’s Stompers (that’s us) with whom they have a good relationship as faculty and friend to Brad for many years now.

I got an email yesterday asking a question. It is the first question sent on this blog. She was asking if I can explain in the most basic terms how all the pieces like SEO, conversion etc… work together based on the StomperNet incubator course I took?

I’m sincerely flattered someone would like to know my take. Here’s my answer:

All those pieces are steps to making money from the Internet. Here they are in the most basic terms I can get you. All the steps link to a specific StomperNet Day they were taught on.

The Five Steps to Internet Income

Step 1: Keyword Research

Find out what keywords you should rank well for. Example if you are selling rare stamps: It is not a matter of ranking #1 for the keyword “stamp”. People may search for “stamp” but that doesn’t mean they are doing a search because stompernet-review-internet-marketing they want to buy stamps. They may simply be interested about stamps. Keyword Research means finding out what keywords will best help you get to meet your goals quickly. In this case, our goal is to make money. So maybe try keywords like “buy rare stamp” or “stamp sale” or “discount stamps”. Whole webinars are devoted to doing Keyword Research. This is the simplest I can go.

Step 2: Site Building

This step is where you build your main site. It can be a website, an online store, a blog, a single web page etc. Basically, you are building the place people go to when they click on that keyword from the search results.

Step 3: SEO

Now you work on getting traffic or people to visit the website you built in Step 2. And you do this by ranking well on Search Engine results. The closer you are to the #1 spot on page 1 of the search results, the more people will come to your website.

Step 4: Conversion

Now that people are going into your website. You now work on “converting” those people into business for your website. Depending on the type of your business, you may have them buy or you may have them click something in your website that may cause you to earn income.

Step 5: Testing

You test till you meet the income you think your website should be generating. Even when you are #1, you continually try to test to see if you can do something better. It is one of the ways how you maintain your edge.

I hope this helps. I’ll share about the other webinar on SEO tomorrow.

Cheers!