Your next amazing idea doesn’t need to be a big project with a ton of investment. Sometimes people jump directly to the website building part of their next big venture, when really that’s more like a mid-point. You can build an amazing website that costs thousands of dollars and looks pretty, but if it doesn’t attract any users or doesn’t convert, you’ve wasted your time and money.

Have a plan.

People skip the planning stage too often. It’s hard work and they don’t want to do it. They just want to jump right in. A plan doesn’t need to be some 30 page business plan, but it should fill a certain amount of criteria. It also doesn’t have to be that detailed. It should answer the 5WH criteria at least:

• Who is my target market? Figuring out your target market can be hard sometimes. I can’t believe how many people I talk to who say their target market is ‘everyone.’ It’s never ‘everyone.’ If you’re working on a non-profit website and looking for donors, your market is probably people with above-average income in your local area. If you’re looking to sell houses, it’s probably recently married women. Know your product’s market. It will save you a ton of time in the long run, because you can build and test accordingly.
• What are my goals? If you don’t know your goals out of the gate, you won’t be focused. Every decision you make for your project needs to work towards those goals. Many people say they need to be clear cut and finite. I disagree. A goal can be as simple as: create awareness. Don’t get me wrong, finite goals make it easier to convey you vision if multiple people are involved, because there is a finish line.
• When do we cut our losses? This is really important. You need to set a negative option goal for yourself to have a clear cut idea of when to get out. If you don’t you can potentially waste a ton of time and energy on a project because you’re passionate about it. Know when to cut your losses and stick to your plan if things don’t work out. Unlike goals, this is where you NEED to be specific. For example: if I don’t make more than $1,000 per month in 6 months, we’re pulling the plug.
• Where can this project benefit other projects? Cross pollination of projects is essential at creating efficiency in your life. There is no such thing as separating different jobs or home and work. You’ll always be thinking about something work related at home and vice versa. Embrace that and make sure that when you’re creating efficiencies, that you’re taking all facets of your life into account. If you’re working on a blog project on Monday and a shopping cart project Wednesday, but both need mailing list software, why not use a package that benefits both? Always have efficiencies of scale in mind.
• Why am I doing this? This should be an easy question, but it’s answer should always point in the direction of your life goals. This will be your motivation.
• How will I fuel this project (time, money, passions, etc.)? This is really where you decide IF you can do something. You need to make sure that you have the TIME and MONEY to venture into something. If you don’t it will probably fail. Don’t stretch yourself too thin either. I’m guilty of that quite often. Make sure you can scale your projects adequately.

Test your market before you go big. Grow incrementally.

Before you invest a ton of resources in a project, test it out on a small scale. If you’re trying to sell things in a shopping cart, just go with the default template for a few weeks before you pay $5,000 for a custom template. Unless what you’re doing is based around a custom designed functionality and is completely new to the market, you should be able to test things cheap.

This also applies to things like pay per click (PPC) campaigns, list building campaigns, blogging, the service industry, and a slew of other things.

I started a similar project with my hosting business. We started with a desktop machine in my basement and were able to grow it incrementally until we had a cluster of servers co-located with Rackspace. You should be able to do the same with whatever venture you’re thinking of working on.

Build features and content. Design can come later.

People on the Internet are trying to scratch an itch. They’re looking to buy something or consume content. For the most part, people don’t care about the design of a site if the content and features are rich and useful.

Don’t get me wrong; building a website that looks nice will help people convert too, but he general idea is that they’re looking for products and services before they’re looking for a ‘pretty’ site. When trying to decide whether to spend $1000 on a logo or additional search features, consider which one your users will appreciate more.

I prefer to build projects that run themselves first and then make them look pretty later. I prefer to make my income as passive as possible. That usually means drop shipping product and automating the process of purchase orders between your cart and vendors, and sometimes that means hiring out portions of the work to a third party.

If your redesign looks better than the original, launch it.

All too often, I’m working on a redesign for a customer that is light years better than their original website before it’s done.  That happens in the first third of the project.  If they don’t observe this rule, the other two thirds of the project can be spent knit picking at the details – delaying the launch.  That’s really tragic when you launch the website and do A/B testing and remove all of the little changes they added anyways.  Just because a design isn’t perfect, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use it right now.

In this same vein, but a little off topic: if you are doing a redesign, don’t add functionality at the same time.  It can be confusing and time consuming.  Do your feature adds at a different time than your design change.  It makes the whole project much less convoluted.

Look at the big picture and go.

Once you’ve built a functional website and then moved on to design, start saving your resources for the next big (but incremental upgrade), but only if it fits the big picture of what you’re trying to do. You don’t need to build a million dollar website out of the gate. There are a ton of websites out there that just grew with their user base. Some of them still have horrible designs too. Look at Craig’s List. It looks horrible, but gets the job done. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, and a ton of the other big ones didn’t start big, but that’s where they are now.

What are your thoughts?

The Smart Way to Start a Project is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

Probably the single biggest question about building websites I get is how to drive traffic. I’m not saying it’s the most important part, but it’s definitely key. Content is king, sure, but if you don’t have traffic, you could be pouring your heart out to a wall. Really what every website wants is quality, converting, long-lasting traffic in high volumes.

There are essentially four ways to drive to your website, which are: search engines, direct traffic, referral links, and your ‘list’. I’m going to teach you how each of those things work on an intermediate level and what their value is compared to the others. I’ll be covering some of the more detailed finer points of these traffic sources in the future. This is basically a primer for what is to come.

Search Engines and SEO

Traffic Potential

The traffic from search engines is theoretically unlimited, but it’s easy to find out the potential of specific keywords using Google’s External Keyword Tool. For instance, I know that there are 74,000 searches for the exact match phrase “keyword tools”. The potential of that keyword match is about 74,000. If you search for all of the key words you’d like to rank for you can sum them up and know your potential. Remember things like overlap between keywords though.

Building Volume

Building volume from search engines is probably the easiest way to drive traffic to your website. You just need to rank (and not necessarily that high) for your search phrases. There are two fundamental ways to build volume on your website through Search Engine Optimization. Those are: off-site optimization and on-site optimization.

On-site SEO is what most people think of when they think of SEO. That being said, I think it is the least useful. I feel like (by far) Google’s algorithm favors off-site SEO over on-site SEO. That is, of course, my opinion. You can do things, such as making sure you have relevant title tags, meta descriptions, and h1 content. You can also make sure that the linking structure on your site contributes the most link juice to the main page of your site (if that’s what you’re going for).

Off-site SEO is, for the most part, link building. You want back links to your site to give you ‘authority’ for the key words you’re trying to rank for. Each backlink you get is like a ‘vote’ for your site in the search engine.

You can get backlinks from a ton of places, like forums, blog comments, guest posts, articles, etc. The best way to determine if another website is worth putting time into is to look at the place where your link is most likely to show up, view the HTML source for those links, and check for this in the anchor tag:

rel=”nofollow”

If that’s over your head, just hit me up on Twitter, Facebook, or email and I’ll help you out. I can even look at the site for you.

The other major thing to keep an eye out for on your backlinks is the anchor text. Make sure the anchor text you’re leaving behind contains the keywords you’re trying to rank for. This means that if you’re putting them in your signature on a forum, don’t link to ‘My Website’, link to ‘Keyword Tools’ or whatever is relevant to what you’re working on.

I will be covering more on backlink building later in the ‘Referral Traffic’ section.

Referral Traffic

Traffic Potential

Referral traffic has unlimited potential (well, limited to every site on the Internet). Theoretically you can have EVERY website link to you and people would visit you through those links. Referral traffic can be pretty great, especially when it’s coming from highly trusted or niche specific sources. Something to be wary of is quantity versus quality. For example, ten visitors from a blog that converts at 50% are much more valuable than 100 visitors from a news site that converts at 1%.

Building Volume

There are really two major types of referral traffic, and those are paid sources and unpaid sources. Paid sources include ad networks like Google Adwords, or sponsored links, like the top listings on YellowPages.com. Un-paid sources are like twitter and Facebook updates, blog comment links, forum signatures, etc.

Paid Sources

Setting up ads using networks like Google Adsense or Facebook is the most common form of paid traffic, but you can also buy paid links and banners directly on other websites. Paid sources, when set up correctly can be a great source of targeted, convertible traffic. Be careful of paid linking as many of the search engines, especially Google frown upon it.

You can also outsource the generation of your traffic to physical people, or start an affiliate program. You can start paying affiliates $1 for everyone they get to sign up for your list. You can also hold a contest, giving away an iPad to the biggest source of referrals to your site over a given period of time. Always be wary of people “gaming” a system though.

Un-paid Sources

Building unpaid backlinks for referrals can be pretty easy. Unlike with SEO backlink building, you don’t need to worry about if the links are giving you ‘votes’. You’re merely trying to drive traffic to your site via other sites. Great sites include Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Digg.

Un-paid sources, of course, also include everything I mentioned in the SEO section above. I find that the best ROI is usually with websites that generate both traffic and “follow” links, so always be aware of the “follow” / “nofollow” value of your links, even though that may not be specifically relevant to this type of traffic.

Direct Traffic

Traffic Potential

Direct traffic is probably the best kind of traffic you can generate. It’s also probably the hardest to track. Direct traffic is virtually unlimited and the quality of visits is really high. The reason the quality is so high is because someone is physically entering your address into their browser to visit your website, so not only is it more work than other methods, but it also requires a bit of recall. Ultimately that means they want to be on your website.

Building Volume

You can literally build volume for this an unlimited number of ways. There are really only 4 categories of how to do it though. They are: offline marketing, video/audio, word of mouth, and collateral from other online marketing. Each of those probably has another whole subset of ways to market, but we’ll probably save that for another day.

Offline Marketing

You can do print advertising, such as business cards, pens, or magazine ads. The ROI of those things can be debated endlessly. The reality is that in some niches they work, and in others they don’t. You can also make shirts and and sponsor events and things like that. All of those things will associate a brand and website with the people involved, and they will become (hopefully) direct traffic users on your site.

Video and Audio

Video and Audio include both online and offline media, so when I’m talking about making a commercial, I mean it can be used on YouTube, Hulu, or your local Fox station. Audio can be in the form of podcasts or radio advertising. You might also be able to do a special radio spot on your local radio station. ALWAYS mention your website in your video and audio recordings, no matter how small. You need to make it part of your introduction: “Hello, I’m James Thompson from jtGraphic.net.”

Word of Mouth

This can have an almost viral effect on the growth of your traffic. The trick is: you have to have something worth talking about. If you have something worth talking about, people will tell their friends, blog about it, or in some other way, spread the word. Be wary – this works with negative feedback as well.

I built my first successful business almost entirely on word of mouth advertising. Every other type of advertising I did for that business was supplemental – like business cards were just a tool for people to remember my web address and phone number.

Collateral Advertising

This is when you generate direct traffic from other advertising that fits into one of the other three categories, because the person viewing your advertising stepped outside of the channel they were supposed to follow. For instance, when you have a Google Ad, and someone notes the URL and types it into the browser, it will register as direct traffic, and not a “click”. This is good and bad.

It is good, because you don’t have to pay for it, but that’s about it. You can’t track it, which is horrible. Thankfully, the number of people that do that is so low that it will hardly register. Other instances of this collateral are situations where your advertising causes people to talk and in turn generates word of mouth. Think about those risque Evony ads. People talk about them all the time. They know how to drive traffic.

Your List

Traffic Potential

This is another one of those potentially unlimited traffic sources. Right now, the potential is the size of the list. A 75 person list will probably get something under 75 visits (I usually guess around 50%). A 7500 person list will probably get something under 7500 visits.

The ratio of conversions from a double opt-in list are amazing. People must work to be part of your list and thusly want to receive it. This means they trust you, and depending on the frequency of your mailings, will usually buy from you if it makes sense to them.

Single-opt and non-opt lists don’t convert very well at all, especially if the list was acquired through some sort gray-hat or black-hat scheme. Usually non-opt lists are considered spam and will burn you, and many times you can get flagged for spam from single-opts as well.

Building Volume

Building your list can be difficult, especially if you don’t get much traffic or are just starting out. The finer points of building a list we’ll cover later, but basically your goal is to collect as many double-opt-in email addresses as possible.

Frank Kern, whom I have mixed feelings about build something called ListControl a while back, which helps increase the growth of your list. It’s not a novel piece of software, but it’s already built and free. Basically the concept is that you give people something free. If they refer your list to “x” number of other people, then they will receive something else that’s free, but cooler. The process just repeats itself until there is a viral-like effect.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you should always be building your traffic via all of these methods, all the time. Always be tracking the analytics of your website and figure out which traffic sources convert the best in terms of ROI. Remember that ROI involves both time and money. You should dedicate the bulk of your time to the sources with the best ROI, but always be trying the others in case the landscape of your niche changes.

This was meant as a stepping stone guide to building traffic, and I’ll be following up with more in-depth posts about each of these topics later.  For now, please throw your questions at me.  Feel free to email me or comment below.

How to Build and Drive Website Traffic is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

I’ve been checking out the Shoemoney System for the last few days, and I haven’t learned anything that I didn’t already know.  I’m hoping that it ramps up soon though.  The videos are basic basic basic, but I’m sure he’s just leveling the playing field for other users.

The sales letter when you first sign up seemed long and annoying.  Why not just do a buy button at the top?  I knew I wanted to try it, but still had to sift through all of that stuff.

The videos and coupons that he advertises are released slowly over time, so you can’t just buy a month, watch and download everything and then cancel (shucks).

It looks like the only complete content is the old podcasts that Jeremy did as Net Income and The ShoeMoney Show on Webmaster Radio, but I’ve heard all of those already.  It would have been cool if the did the work to edit them down into something more to the point.

I also haven’t been impressed by the promise that the first 100 signups for the system get a special bonus, but it’s been like a week and a half and we still don’t know who we hare.  I’m fairly sure I’m in the first 100, because I signed up in 3 minutes, but who knows.

Unfortunately, content is released so slowly that I don’t really have much to say.  One of the videos everyone can watch, because it’s public, and the other three are about things I know very well: setting up a Google account, what affiliate marketing is, and setting up a ClickBank account.

I also noticed that many of the users complained about the same things in the week 1 webinar, so I don’t feel completely alone with this.

My conclusion?  I’ll give it a little more time before I completely judge…

Review: The Shoemoney System is Meh for Advanced Users. is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

This builds on a function I did last week: db_query(). You can send any array straight to a MySQL database and it’ll even check to make sure the column actually exists.  Oh, and it returns the id of the record you just added in case you needed it.

<?php
   function db_array_insert($cfg_array, $table, $array) {
      require_once("dbQuery.function");

      $sql = "show columns from ".$table
      $tableArray = db_query($cfg_array, $sql);
      $inputString = "";

      foreach($tableArray as $key => $value) {
         if (array_key_exists($value[0], $array) && $value[0])
            $inputString .= "'".addslashes($array[$value[0]])."', ";
         else
            $inputString .= "'', ";
      }

      $inputString = substr($inputString, 0, -2);
      $sql = "insert into $table values(".$inputString.")"
      db_query($cfg_array, $sql);

      return mysql_insert_id();
   }

   $insert_array = array(
      "column_1" => "something_1",
      "column_2" => "something_2"
   );

   $cfg_array = array(
      "db_loc" => 'www.databaselocation.com',
      "db_user" => 'some user'
      "db_pass" => 'some password'
      "db_name" => 'database_name_here'
   );

   db_array_insert($cfg_array, "some_table", $insert_array); //and use it.
?>

So what do you think?  Having a problem?  Just let me know in the comments.

Tidbit Tuesday on PHP: Simple MySQL Database Insert Function is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

Have you ever wondered why fonts use points, or what that unit of measure is in Photoshop – the Pica?  Did you know that pixes and screen fonts are very much related to old school printing?  Here’s the place where I can bring it all together for you.  First the definitions:

Points

There are 72 points in an inch.

Picas

There are 12 points in a Pica.

Printing

Standard printing methods use points and picas to measure the size of fonts and paper or other objects on the print.  For instance a newspaper may use a 12 point (1 pica) font on a peice of paper.  Try dividing a regular 8.5 x 11 peice of paper into thirds.  It’s much easier to say 11 inches is 66 picas, so it’d be three 22 pica folds instead of every 3.66 inches.

Pixels and Screen Typography

It’s interesting to see the correlation of old school typesetting when looking at modern day computers.  The standard resolution is 72 pixels per inch, which means each pixel is one point.  That makes things easy.  Did you ever wonder why the largest font size in Word is 72?  It’s because that font should be one inch high on you screen – and who would want to go bigger than that?

I just learned all of this from a customer of mine recently.  Have anything to add?

Printing, Picas, Points, and Pixels: How’re they related? is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

Goals and resolutions are not the same thing.  Let’s look at their definitions as advertised via dictionary.com:

goal

–noun
1. the result or achievement toward which effort is directed; aim; end.
2. the terminal point in a race.

res⋅o⋅lu⋅tion

–noun
1. a formal expression of opinion or intention made, usually after voting, by a formal organization, a legislature, a club, or other group. Compare concurrent resolution, joint resolution.
2. a resolve or determination: to make a firm resolution to do something.
3. the act of resolving or determining upon an action or course of action, method, procedure, etc.
4. a solution, accommodation, or settling of a problem, controversy, etc.

What’s the difference?

When you resolve to do something, you are setting up an action that you will carry out without measurable results.  For example: “I will exercise more this year,” “I will lose weight,” “I will spend more time at home,” etc., etc.  A goal is the vessel by which you take a resolution and define a measurable outcome.

What this means to me:

Every new year, I define a set of goals for the year, both personally, and for my business.  I express those goals for my business through an annual review of the business plan – a document defining my finite goals for the year, next three years, ten years, and life of the company.  I define my personal goals here on this blog.  All of the goals I set for myself follow a specific format.

Formatting a Goal

I use a simple acronym for defining my goals: SMART.  Smart stands for:

• Simple
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timelined

For instance, looking at my previous post: My Goals for 2009, we can pick out the goal: “Put $10,000 into my IRA.”  This goal is simple because I only need to do one thing.  Tracking it isn’t complicated.  It is measurable.  Each dollar I put in is a measurable unit.  It’s attainable.  I’m pretty sure I can do this if I hold myself to it.  It’s realistic.  I’m not putting more than I make into my IRA.  It has a timeline, because these are my 2009 goals, I have until Dec. 31, 2009 to complete them.

Following Through

Goals are only useful if you follow through.  I like to set goals far enough in advance and broad enough that if I fall short for a couple days, I can recover.  I like to make “thermometers” to track how close I am to acheiving goals as well.  I can organize all of my thermometers into a dashboard of sorts and rate myself on my progress.  I can find places I fall short and work on improving those areas.

I hope this helps you turn your resolutions into goals and your goals into results.

Goals vs. Resolutions is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

The News

I first heard about the new Google AJAX Libraries API from Jeremy Schoemaker’s blog.  He mentions using it to reduce WordPress bandwidth, but really it can be used to reduce bandwidth in most AJAX based web development environments.

The Exciting Part

I persoanlly use prototype the most, and I’m extremely excited that I can use their libraries instead of uploading my own for each site.  I’m especially excited that calling specific version numbers is possible.  This makes upgrading a code set extremely simple, especially if you call the code version as a variable at the beginning of your code.

Realistically your javascript code is probably one of the lightest weight parts of your code, but every little bit helps, especially if you’re serving a large amount of users every month.

Optional Settings

Script Compression

I think one of the greatest optional settings for all of the scripts you can load is compression.  It’s not available for all of the APIs, but it is for most.  What it does is remove all of the whitespace from the API to reduce file size for the end user – increasing speed.  If you mix that with something like the javascript compiling on Google Chrome and you’ll have lightning fast AJAX applications.

No CSS

You can optionally remove the CSS from the scripts you’re remotly loading, which allows you to do one of three things: load the default CSS, load your own CSS, or not load the CSS at all.

Resources

WordPress.org: Google AJAX Libraries API Plugin – This plugin uses the GALA whereever possible in your WordPress installation.

Google AJAX APIs Blog – This is a great place to go if this really iterests you and you’ll be using this code regularly.  They’re always adding new scripts to the API, so if you don’t see the one you want yet, keep an eye on their blog.

Saving Bandwidth with Google Ajax Libraries API is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

Overview

Google Sites is a product recently released by Google to create a place for colleagues to collaborate. I think it is meant to work something like a cross between Microsoft’s ultra complex SharePoint, and MySpace. The idea is to give users flexible control over their sites look and feel, while making it easy for users with out development or design skills to launch a functional work space. Once the site is created, users can collaborate in that “space.”

Joining

This is pretty straight forward. Just navigate to the Google Sites main page and set up an account. Your organization will need to be a member – using Google Apps. This can be a bit of a hassle if you aren’t the admin for your organization. I think this is Google’s way to combat the lash back from IT staff.

Setting Up a New Site

From the Dashboard, just click “Create New Site,” and you’ll be prompted for some basic information like: a site name, category, and description. You can also set who you’d like to collaborate with and pick a pre-defined theme from a rather bland selection of pre-made templates. When you’re done playing with these options, click “Create Site.” Your new site is online!

Using Your Site

Now that your site has been created, you can start using it. A nice place to start is with the “Edit Page” button just above the default “Home” page. This converts the whole page to a text area and title bar that are editable. You can place whatever content you want in there now, with standard options like bold, italics, underlines, links, bullets, etc. Click save when you’re done, and the page is published. You also have the option of attaching files and leaving comments.

Just next to the “Edit” button is a “Create New Page” button. This is where you can create new pages and add them the the “parent -> child” tree that the site is built on. Just below this area is the navigation menu, with a conveniently available site map, which is dynamically built, based on the pages you’ve created.

Tweaking Your Site

Really dialing in your site is where the fun begins. In the top right of your browser window, you can click “Site settings” and be taken to a page where you can edit site sharing settings, the appearance, and “other stuff.” The most interesting part is the appearance settings, where you can modify things like colors, fonts, and background images for different sections of the page. You can also modify your theme or site elements here.

Site elements are like widgets on the left bar next to the main content on your pages. Right now, there are only a few site elements, but I would imagine that they would add more as popularity grows. It may become something like the “widgets” for iGoogle (which by the way, I love).

The real meat of the Appearance section is “Colors and Fonts.” This is where you can upload your own background images and change colors for your theme create your own custom theme. I tried fairly successfully to recreate the look and feel of this site. One thing Google Sites does a lot better than a lot of other sites I’ve seen is the style manager. What one would usually use CSS styling for is in a nice GUI. For instance, adding a background image in the top left that doesn’t repeat involves just uploading the image, selecting vertical, horizontal, and repeat settings from drop downs, and hitting save. It’s done. That will probably make a lot of users that don’t know CSS quite happy.

“Other Stuff” is where you change things like your title, categories, and description. Oh, and you can delete the whole site here too.

My Thoughts

I’m quite underwhelmed by Google Sites. Products like WordPress seem to be much better. Although I’ve never used it, Blogger seems like a much better alternative if you’re looking for a Google product. That being said, this is an extremely new offering, and I’m sure it will get dialed in a lot better. Maybe the should have tagged it with “beta” for a couple years, like Gmail. This is also free. I find it hard to give something free a bad review, because your ROI is divided by zero. Im interested to see where this goes in the future.

I also felt like there should be more. That feeling just kind of confused me the whole way through. I think it may have just been so simple it was hard. Maybe I’m just dumb.

What do you think about it?

Google Sites Leaves me Bored AND Confused is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson