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The Perfect Online Business

For a long time I thought to myself, when I start my own business tomorrow, is there a comprehensive list or “how-to” guides that cover EVERYTHING I would need to set up to make my online business, well, perfect? A list I can just work my way through, ticking all the boxes so I can focus my energy on our competitive advantage and NOT getting the traffic (unless our CA is the way in which we get traffic, but that’s for another discussion).

But clearly each business is different; from a range of online business models to a multitude of industries. I suppose even one business using the same business model in the same industry as another would have a different online marketing plan from one that is in another country or of a different size.

Having a chat with David Sutton last night, he was adamant that all an entrepreneur should be doing is getting new business. This made me think, all the rest needs to be systems, automation and staff (even taking care of old clients).

So I have decided to spend some time (probably quite a bit of time actually) writing up what I believe to be the golden rules that all online start-ups should follow; one page essential lists of “must-do’s” for:

  • SEO
  • Social Media and Blogging
  • PPC
  • E-mail
  • Usability and Experience on the site
  • Tracking, Analytics and Monitoring
  • Linking
  • Mobile
  • Conversion
  • Getting paid and invoicing – the Financials
  • Other tools worth considering

Regardless if we end up out-sourcing some of these, buying software or systems that do it for us, or doing it in-house, I think the key to success online (that’s if you have the right product to begin with) is SYNERGY. Do everything listed above and the traffic you get will be greater than the sum of all the traffic each tool would bring in if used on its own, or the rule of:

1+1=3

The 10 Golden Lists will be updated here.

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One Thing Leads to Another – Semantics

The true value of Social Media to me, as a student of the constantly evolving digital world, is that it keeps me in the loop.

I click on a link to a blog, which links to a newsletter by a guru I trust. There is a word there I don’t understand in the context of SEO. This word is “semantic”. So I Google it and find an adequate answer on Wikipedia. I now Google the word in a context based (SEO) question and find a website that teaches me something I should have known before, but didn’t.

So I write this blog, telling you about the tilde symbol “~”, which lets me find semantically similar phrases on Google for keywords which I am trying to optimise.

You just put the ~ symbol in front of a keyword or phrase, for example: “~advertising ~agency” and then Google search it. The results, as you will see in the picture below include, in bold, all the semantically similar keywords that Google identifies for this search. These can be used in blog posts, website content, twitter posts etc. to bring relevant traffic to your website through Google.

Click to View Original Size

Keywords or phrases, some surprisingly, seem to include: authority, magazine, management, design, office, jobs, media, design jobs and media jobs.


Finally to complete the loop, I now take this post and tweet about it, completing a cycle of knowledge sharing which, I do not believe can be made any better or faster unless someone invents a way to directly program knowledge into our brains.