While there’s a massive market of online business owners to sell information to; there are also a huge number of businesses that are providing them with the informational products. So, as with any business, you will need to make your own informational items stand out from all the rest of them out there.

To do that, you will need to figure out how to bring your own uniqueness to what you’re providing in your business. There are some ways that they could be accomplished:

Niche marketing- Finding a specific group of business owners to market to; can increase your chances of getting your items chosen by the consumers.

Providing certain kinds of content- For example, you can choose to sell only materials that cover various topics on PLR content. Or you could cover all kinds of topics using only reports to give them that information.

Knowledge or experience- If you have knowledge or experience in any certain area, then you can use that to your advantage. There are many ways to do that. If you have a business degree, you can use that to establish a level of expert status for yourself. Maybe you have owned a business in a particular niche for several years, which gains you credibility as well as expert status.

Point of View- Sometimes giving a different point of view on a topic can establish your uniqueness and gain you a nice sharp edge on your competition. For example, maybe you have inside information on a particular topic. This could be used to play on the business owner’s desires.

Establishing a name for yourself- This is a strong tactic to use within the social networking communities. Once you build rapport with the fellow members of the group you have joined; you start to show them what you’re all about. As they get to know you; you start to become a ‘celebrity’ of sorts within that niche. Voila! You’ve established a name for yourself and people have trust to buy from you.

Broaden your horizons- Get yourself out there to every corner of the internet. Join Message boards, forums, run a blogging community, and utilize all the available tools the internet provides like social bookmarking sites. The more your name is out there, the more your business is known. And then what? More Sales happen.

Show your caring side- Don’t be afraid to show that not only are you a business person, but you’re a caring one as well. Those who are caring tend to build rapport with their target audience easier and quicker. For example, if you’re a mom who owns a business, and you target other moms who have businesses; you should show that. When the target audience can see you’re just like them, they will be more drawn to you.

Using a different format- Most of your competitors are probably providing their customers with simple written materials on various topics. To stand out, you could use a different media format to offer your information with. This could be:

• Video format
• Audio format
• Teleclasses/Webinars

These formats give your customers a different way to learn their information from. Instead of always having to read a document on their computer, they can watch a video of you talking about it instead. You can also attach a written transcript with it, so they can follow along if they choose or give them something to refer to later on when questions arise.

Online Business owners have the desire to succeed. They also have the desire to learn how to better themselves and their business. Put these two factors together and you have a prime Money making opportunity on your hands.

Get into this billion dollar industry and market the information they want, need and most of all desire. This is Problem-Solution. They have a problem and you have the solution. You have the knowledge to offer them, so give what they desire-information on how to succeed.

Author Bio: One way to make it easy to get this information out to your market is with the Special Report Club. Each month you receive a new fully-customizable 30 page report & complete marketing materials, so you can start selling information the lucrative online business owner market right away. While you’re there, join the affiliate program for recurring monthly commissions.

Not much done towards my traffic challenge this week. Had a weekend away and then I was playing catch up with everything. However the Alexa ranking of this blog has risen to 1,074,105 and is on target for getting below 1,000,000 during the next week.

The article that I submitted to Ezine Articles and Isnare was finally been accepted a couple of days back and is currently on 15 other websites and blogs and has been sent out in a couple of ezines. That will give backlinks and hopefully click throughs to this blog and as it’s early days the article will probably end up on a lot more sites and blogs in time.

I’ve almost finished the next article for article marketing so once I’ve got a few more out on the directories and on my Squidoo page there should be a noticeable difference in traffic results.

Statistics

Now we’ll have a look at Google Analytics. The overall bounce rate is now 60.96% with the average time spent on the blog being 3.31 minutes. Last week the bounce rate was 67.32% so less visitors are clicking away. According to GA yhere have been 152 visitors altogether in 5 weeks, yet last week it said 186. Something weird going on there so I’ll check out my cpanel statistics instead.

Awstats tell me that there were 651 unique visitors during February and there have been 185 unique visitors in the first 4 days of March with 91 the highest on the 2nd. Because of the Alexa ranking I suspect that the cpanel stats are more likely to be right. Maybe I’m not looking at the right figures in GA, maybe neither are right. I’ve decided to set up another of my sites with GA to see what’s what.

A few decent comments have been added which helps to make a site or blog stickier when it comes to the search engines. Unfortunately there are far more spam comments than decent ones. Over 600 in a month and the usual porn, loan and medical links. A pathetic waste of time because the spam comments never get published, only the comments that might add value to the blog.

Plug Ins

I added Broken Link Checker this week. It lets you know in your dashboard if there are any broken links and you can repair them from there rather than searching through articles. That’s an excellent thing to have and probably one of my favourite plug ins.

I also added a plug in called Instant Tweets to my Firefox browser. Apart from a few other functions I can click on a little blue bird in my browser to instantly add any web page that I wish to Twitter.

Social Networking

Still not sure of the value of Twitter for myself. There are some internet marketers who swear by it. The following people and they follow you back aspect seems like a game to me and I’d rather spend my time writing or improving my websites but maybe that’s me being blinkered. I can see the value of having a big following if you launch a product and you announce it to your followers. Or if you want reviews or testimonials it would be a quick way to get them if you’ve got thousands of people to ask.

You could drive yourself dizzy with all of the different social networking sites and end up spending more time networking than actually working. Maybe that’s good maybe not. I will always social bookmark my sites and pages but I want to spend quality time creating first and foremost. The blinkers are not there though, I will watch and learn more about this so called internet marketing phenomina.

Pings

I added a lot more sites for this blog to automatically ping to every time a post is added. Pinging is basically letting the internet know about your new content and attracting more visitors. Obviously that is a good reason to add content every day.

Goals

My goals for next week are to get the Alexa ranking below 1 million, get 100 visitors for at least one of the days, send 2 articles out to directories with this link in the author bio. I also want to finish the sales page for a package that I’ve put together, redesign this blogs header and design a logo. I doubt I’ll get all that done because I’ve got a heavy week ahead of me, but even if I spend 15 minutes a day on the blog it will keep things moving towards my 6 month traffic target.

I left things yesterday with looking for content for this blog and that’s where I hit problems. I visited my article directory and looked in the Free Tools and Resources category and had a bit of a wake up call.

You see when I started my article directory in July 2007 to get the ball rolling I added a script that would import articles from another company. The next day 47,000 appeared and brought massive problems with them.

Many articles had been submitted to the wrong categories, new categories had been formed which duplicated some of the categories already there, for instance Mortgage and Mortgages, links were stripped from author bios and there were many crap articles that I wouldn’t have accepted.

The script got fixed for link stripping but it didn’t solve the other problems so I stopped using it after a week and just took articles that were manually submitted. I spent a lot of time putting things right but you always miss something.

Last night when I visited the Free Tools and Resources section I found that most of the articles in there were out of category, even one about buying coffins for goodness sake. When I found a suitable article for this blog I discovered that the link was dead. I then checked that authors account and he has over 500 articles on the directory and of the 20 or so articles that I checked all of the links were dead.

Not a good sign for somebody who is offering advice about Internet marketing. Something could have happened in his personal life to end his business, or he just might not have made it as an Internet marketer.  Either is possible but if it’s the latter it indicates just how tough it is to make it in a home business internet or otherwise.

Dead links leave directory owners with a quandary. We know that a lot of dead links might affect a websites status in the search engines so we need to deal with them. Three choices:

1. Find an active link of that author and replace the dead links with it.

2. Delete all of the articles

3. Replace the links with your own active links or those of a charity.

Usually I go for option 1 and then option 2 if I can’t find an active link for that author. I would feel as if it was cheating to go for option 3, though a link to a charity might be a good idea.

Adding Content

Now that I’ve sorted out the article directory and added a few posts from there I’m going to add some of my own fresh content to this blog. The search engines like unique content so I always intersperse my own content amongst other peoples articles.

I make sure that there are some good keywords in the titles and articles but not so many that it doesn’t make sense. I also add my keywords as tags to give my articles a search engine boost.

Thoughts About This Theme

I really like this theme and although currently I haven’t made many of my own changes I can see that it’s easy to do. When I write a new page and publish it the page automatically gets a link at the top of the page. On my other blogs I have to add those links with html.

I did try to add categories for the recommended website links but so far I haven’t managed that, but I’ll figure it out sooner or later.

Hello World

After writing some content I then decided to sort out my Google sitemap. Sitemaps are cool in that they make it easier for the search engines to find and index your web pages. I made my sitemap by easily adding a plugin to the blog and once I had set it up the sitemap notified Google and some other search engines that the blog was up and running. I was then able to indicate how often that I wanted Google to crawl different aspects of this blog.

You might be wondering why I attach so much importance to content, keywords, tags, sitemaps and search engines so I’ll try to explain. If you think of a new website as a shop, but the shop has nothing in the window, no signs and no advertising has been done, then unless somebody stumbles upon it by accident then it won’t have any customers.

The same applies to a website or blog so you need to signal to the search engines that you are up and running and keep them happy enough to send traffic your way.

After submitting the sitemap I placed an advert on a free advertising blog and then checked my other websites and blogs to see if they were linking to this blog. If not I will place a link and instantly have some backlinks.

During the rest of the evening I will be checking free Wordpress widgets and plug ins to see if there is anything that might be useful to me.

This blog came about because I bought this really naff domain last year and used it for a bunch of free products to help build a list. Then I  saw that my other blogs were starting to do well and was itching to build another with this great flexibility theme.

You see I like experimenting with different things and learning. I decided to set myself a challenge and that was to get a PR of at least 2 and an Alexa ranking of less than 300,000 within 6 months. On 28/2/09 and day one of this blog the PR is a big fat zero and the Alexa ranking is 7,094,643 – easy peasy!

Before I started my challenge I needed to decide what the blog was going to be about. I guess that the domain gave me a clue. Friends help each other and Internet marketing aint that easy so why not make it a place where my visitors and myself can help each other by recommending free, low cost and genuinely useful products and services.

Decision made, I can start thinking about traffic. This domain has only been getting on average 17 visitors a month for the last 6 months so my initial aim is to double that within the first week and then 17 a day by the end of next month. After that a gradual increase until I hit my targets.

The first thing that I’m going to do to get traffic is add some more content. Google likes content and will certainly send some visitors my way if I add enough varied content on a regular basis. Where do I get  content from? An article directory, and as I happen to own one I know exactly where to lay my hands on some good material.